


Lizbob Supernatural Meta (season 11)

by lizbobjones



Series: Lizbob Supernatural Meta Collection [13]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Meta Essay, Non Fiction, archived from elizabethrobertajones blog
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-17 10:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 30,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16972848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbobjones/pseuds/lizbobjones





	1. 11x01 or Priorities

Vague first thoughts (before I really start looking at everyone’s response so sorry if this has been said already) that that episode could have been subtitled “Priorities”. These are all just some vague first viewing thoughts and particularly with Sam n Dean there was a lot to take in before I’d drunk my coffee so my opinion is liable to swing around. :P

Crowley as the example to give us the theme showing us what terrible priorities look like - not just saving his own skin (literally - diverting Hell’s resources to get it back during uncertain times when he already had found a replacement meatsuit and could have just carried on as her for any reason other than being sentimental for being the other body, so it was a completely pointless mission to recover said skin) but screwing around before bothering to call for help when presented with a distraction (… this paragraph not the place to discuss that scene :P). And then being dismissive of the rumours that has Hell jumpy once they are back, instead of acting like a leader and reacting right away to the news to at least consider what others are saying. There’s the sense he doesn’t trust the news his advisers bring him and THEY seem to be questioning his priorities and judgement all the way through with their manner of interruptions. Then he decides that the Darkness could be a good thing for  _him:_  “Darkness, King of Hell?” he says, deciding for himself that if it’s true, then she can be exploited as an ally.

(Hell, outside of Crowley’s circle, rather better priorities :P And Lucifer and/or Michael with the sense to try to warn  _even_  Hell. Beyond Crowley’s influence, Hell in general seems a fairly sensible side in all this.)

Then we’ve got Cas (*aggressively sad face*) who on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from Crowley, puts himself last, not wanting to hurt anyone else and completely fed up of being put in the position where he would. He calls for help from Heaven first, knowing they’d have the power to stop him, and is avoiding people so as not to hurt them, while Crowley was going out of his way to find someone to possess and someone else to kill to make a call. Then in the inversion of Crowley’s… whatever that was… only once he’s called Heaven to come get him, does he call Dean for ~social~ reasons (since he’s not calling for help), being quick to insist that he’s okay and Dean can’t do anything about it if he weren’t, and checking that Dean is also okay while catching up the loose ends of the plot that they didn’t know. Considering from a promo people were upset that Dean was bothering Cas for info on the Darkness, it’s reassuring that the phonecall was A: started by Cas and B: had him aggressively downplaying his issues for the sake of actually wanting a generic plot conversation basically to reassure himself that Dean was okay, and to warn them about Rowena, deliberately being as vague as he could about the fact he’d turned himself in to Heaven.

Heaven on the other hand, or, those angels who came for him, are clearly prioritising a personal agenda against Cas. They tell him the portal has been moved (i.e. to stop him getting back in) but for a moment he thinks he means to where they’ve taken him, when in fact they’re dealing with him apparently off the record. It leaves us wondering who ordered this and why Cas was not taken back to Heaven, but we’re in the dark as him right now (hahahaha I’m sobbing). There’s potentially conflicting motives at work here, and Heaven’s overall priorities have been murky and ominous since the very end of season 9. They don’t give Cas a chance to tell them about the Darkness - he’d probably have done so if he hadn’t thought they were just in transit - and muffle him before he can explain there’s worse things out there than him at the moment, which gives us a negative where their priorities are still focussed on policing their own (Cas is now another one of the rogue angels lol I knew it) and not concerned for the rest of the planet. 

Outside of those two mirrored storylines of getting Crowley back in a room full of demons and Cas in a room full of angels (to opposite beneficial result to them), we have Sam and Dean in an ongoing back and forth about what their own priorities should be, both aware that they’ve dropped off the deep end on the wrong side of “saving people/hunting things”, their show-long moral compass if you want to give them one that actually makes sense for their characters outside of “good/bad”. It’s important there’s examples where neither of them shoot someone who’s infected this episode: Sam didn’t know waiting it out would work but hesitating to just start killing again led him to discover the shelf life the infected have, and later with poor old Mike waiting it out works for Dean as well, based off the info Sam learned from not killing. It’s not ideal since people are dying but they’re not resorting to violence yet; they’re TRYING to make their priority at the very least saving people and not mindlessly hunting things just because it seems like a shoot ‘em up zombie apocalypse all of a sudden, which viewpoint Sam is important for turning Dean onto (i.e. he wouldn’t have waited Mike out if he hadn’t known from Sam’s hesitation to kill earlier that there was a chance they wouldn’t have to shoot him). 

Sam also runs from the infected rather than draw them away and trap them. When Sam does kill one of the infected she bleeds on him, infecting him, and that’s his reward for killing. Sam’s priorities skew towards self-sacrifice as a way to make it up, and he gets his wish. Which… is still not ideal because splitting off from the group and getting infected isn’t exactly a life-long plan to repair the relationship, but he needs big selfless gestures right now I guess. 

Dean starts off in the hospital with hyper focus on getting everyone out and protecting the kid, at my best guess actually probably influenced by their connection with the Mark, so perhaps that focus is compromised. (Count me suspicious about that and the fact that his saving people focus may turn out to be way more complicated than  _just_ getting the baby out of the hospital.) Anyway, in order to get out he has to let Sam risk himself, so that’s a symbolic sacrifice on his part, prioritising random people they’ve just met over Sam for the sake of saving them by agreeing to the plan. Sam then chooses not to tell Dean that he’s infected, letting him discuss a long term response to the problem while hiding that he has apparently a very short shelf life now, perhaps to keep Dean focussed on protecting people instead of rushing back for him, but meaning that’s more lying to Dean about how someone is, treading carefully around what he needs to know, showing 2 examples of self sacrificing morons (*pauses to slap Sam and Cas upside the head*) not letting Dean know how they are, probably with consideration for how terrible his priorities are when people he loves are hurt or in trouble. 

The Darkness in turn shows HER priorities in a different way by yanking Dean out of the car to talk to him but leaving Sam: when they meet up again they discuss why not Sam when he played the more active role in releasing her, showing us again that there was a choice to pick between them where either could have fit her phrasing and in fact Sam was confused because it sounded to him more like something she should have been thanking him for, and as Dean’s memories of the encounter are revealed to us we see she picked on him for having had the mark, picking what basically became an inherent quality over actions. He currently seems more connected to the season’s myth arc than Sam in the usual “i didn’t ask for this” way while Sam if he had been thanked for freeing the Darkness and being commended for his actions might actually seem  _more_  the less neutral path. Dean comments there’s blame for both of them (that he didn’t tell Cain to shove it when he had the chance) but in terms of the end of season 10 he was pointedly passive about removing the Mark at the cost of anyone, while Sam went ahead with it, so if he had been thanked, it would imply the Darkness approved of the actions and the death toll… I’m agreeing she seems less evil than advertised (i.e. to go back to Crowley assuming because she’s ~dark~ and spooky she’ll probably be a good ally seems like a dangerous assumption one episode in). 


	2. "Love Wins"

[@bluestar86](https://tmblr.co/m-wUC-tY8dlf7K9XGjK6Xkw) and I have been talking for the last couple of days about the television clips this season so far and what they mean. The conclusion?

## Basically we’ve been told “love wins” “love will get us out of here” and “everything will be ok”.

(to borrow Saz’s phrasing :P)

Thanks to [@untamedpassages](https://tmblr.co/mpM_9bYGhBaQsVjy2W8s_8w) prompting us to go back and look at 11x02 and the clip there, we were talking about the 3 TV clips this season, from 11x13 and 11x18, which were seemingly just background noise in their scenes, but connected to this theme. (There has been other television especially connected to Cas, but these 3 clips stand out). 

The 11x02 one, Bluestar already went back and revisited here:

<http://bluestar86.tumblr.com/post/142653760473/ah-little-lad-youre-staring-at-my-fingers> 

after we connected it to [the handprint theme of the season](http://bluestar86.tumblr.com/post/141972146358/hand-prints-in-season-11), which is inescapably Destiel-coded even if there wasn’t [a ton of actual shoulder touching](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/tagged/Dean%27s-elbow-fetish-for-ts/) between Dean and Casifer this season that we’ve been analysing. 

The lines from it are:

> “Ah, little lad, you’re staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand? The story of good and evil? H-A-T-E! It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low. L-O-V-E! You see these fingers, dear hearts? These fingers has veins that run straight to the soul of man. The right hand, friends, the hand of love. Now watch, and I’ll show you the story of life. Those fingers, dear hearts, is always a-warring and a-tugging, one agin t'other. Now watch ‘em! Old brother left hand, left hand he’s a fighting, and it looks like love’s a goner. But wait a minute! Hot dog, love’s a winning! Yessirree! It’s love that’s won, and old left hand hate is down for the count!” 

While this clip was from Sam’s side of the story in that split-location episode, and references the Cain and Abel story in its speech, it was interestingly applicable to the broader themes of story at the time when we weren’t sure how else the season would be going, but as the season has progressed the story has unfolded in ways which make it really worth revisiting in light of the new themes, hence the long meta

the next one from 11x13 is much more straightforward, since we already had the Casifer situation ongoing and so commentary on it at the time reflected that, such as this meta from [@venusdebotticelli](https://tmblr.co/mzRb-zBiW9PdcRN5OsOI0Kw)

<http://venusdebotticelli.tumblr.com/post/139105302796/so-in-an-episode-where-rotten-unhealthy-love-comes>

the [dialogue in question](http://thevioletcaptain.tumblr.com/post/139104230253/1113-love-hurts) for this is:

> Satan: True love, alright? So everyone just, uhh… go back to your sloppy tots—  
> Gary: Is he gone? Like,  _gone_  gone?  
> Claude: True love can get us out of here?   
> Satan: Yeah.  
> All the guys: What?! *indistinct chatter*  
> Satan: Hey, hey! Listen. Listen!    
> Dude: Yeah, I’ve been in love a million times.   
> Demon: Listen! 

as well as the space reference on the TV leading to the easy assumption this was supposed to be about Cas, revisiting past Cas and TV themes 

<http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/139117259465/f-ckyeahfutbol-koryuoftheriverflow-voice>

which of course in light of 11x18 making Cas and TV such an important issue in of itself (outside of this theme we’re exploring here) means that if you’ve been [tracking this theme](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/tagged/product-placement-angel) [through the season](http://justanotheridijiton.tumblr.com/tagged/cas+and+television), ends up with new posts on the theme every few episodes after 11x04 & 6 started it in earnest.

So finally we get to 11x18 and the TV clip that we didn’t even see, just saw Cas watching and heard the dialogue from:

<http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/tagged/firesign-theater>

> Deacon: “Is it going to be all right?”  
> Congregation: “It’s going to be all right!!  
> Deacon: "You bet, dear friends, it’s going to be all right tonight, here at the Powerhouse Church of the Presumptuous Assumption of the Blinding Light.”  
> Soloist: “Oh blinding light,oh light that blinds,I cannot see,look out for me.” 

In this case I think that this clip in context of 11x18 was more ironic than anything, that the dialogue on the TV was talking about being saved, because of course that scene was a failure on their part to rescue Cas. Mostly because phrasing it as “rescuing” him is far too simple a term when he’s in this state. 

I don’t think it’s as simple as a failure for this to pay off when it comes up again in this scene as Cas isn’t saved, despite what the TV is telling us, because for all the positivity in the dialogue about love winning or saving everyone in the first quotes from earlier in the season it wasn’t acted upon as a power of love saving Cas moment yet (like, not even as a failed attempt to do that) and so nothing in the story has actually responded to these statements yet. 

Rather we think, especially with the 11x02 clip being posed in part of the season opener that sets the mood and tone for the entire season, that this is just a part of the thematic story of the season.

In the longer term of looking at these series of moments when the TV has talked to us, and stringing together all the dialogue, in each case the key phrasing is about being saved, or love winning, usually with enough dramatic irony to their situation to make it more than casually relevant. When we looked at it this way it seems to be telling a story across the season and that has a surprisingly positive message even before you start connecting it more closely to the themes around Cas or Destiel this season. 


	3. Jenna and Angels

## Jenna & angels

[I’m going to preface this with saying I’m not exactly thrilled about the deaths this episode, and this isn’t me trying to come up with a justification but this is still interesting to me]

I’m still thinking about the Cas and Jenna parallel set up last episode ([some of which detailed by an ask here](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/130760588948/im-not-sure-what-the-intention-was-behind-this)). To me the visual of a Cas mirror carelessly smashing angels onto the ground is a fairly obvious parallel to the damage Cas has caused Heaven over the years - and a part of why Cas was being tortured this episode, as well [as](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/131246537633/omg-the-angel-smashing-just-reminded-me-of-deans) [other](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/131244933668/i-read-your-post-about-jenna-angels-and-it-got) [things](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/131447069593/dustydreamsanddirtyscars-04x22-lucifer-rising). I think this runs MUCH deeper though.

Bearing in mind I’m just starting my way through an in-depth season 6 rewatch, I was literally picking at writing stuff about Soulless!Sam last night so Soulless!Jenna instantly reminds me of all the analysis I’ve been keeping in mind/coming up with about him. Part of what made S!Sam so fascinating is that he sort of ran on the basic Sam operating system, with all his old memories and indeed his sense of purpose (he clearly felt it was important to be a good hunter and valued his abilities and others for their skill in an objective sort of way). All he lacked was the emotional filter to it and a sense of moral right or wrong to guide how he achieved his purpose as he understood it.

Jenna returns to a childhood neighbourhood - her parents are missing from the story except in vague mentions, but she says she spent a great deal of time in this neighbourhood anyway, living or staying with her Grandma, who’s helpfully hoarded both stuff from when her dad was a baby, and presumably some of Jenna’s own clothes, since Amara found clothes for a girl that fit her. There was also an emphasis on her grandmother’s Catholicism ([this post shows all the religious imagery in her house](http://nerdylittleshit.tumblr.com/post/131444924007/god-help-us-11x02-and-religious-symbols)), which on one hand was merely the way to involve Crowley in the picture, but also built on what we knew about Jenna. In 11x01 we heard from Mike that he trusted her because he had been seeing her at church since she was a child, and so we know Jenna’s parents, presumably at least her father who was raised in this environment too, were religious and we know Jenna has had a religious upbringing even away from her grandmother’s house, which was a long drive out from Superior.

She also mentions in passing that she has had at least one queer experience in her life, and in the way that quickly coding stuff for a story works, we’re to assume that the throw away “she did” is intended to show that Jenna is a queer character. 

Jenna’s grandmother was lovely to Jenna when she first came in the door, and acted just like every stereotypical loving grandmother, but the first indication that things are fraught comes when they’re both scared of Amara after she demands to be fed: Grandma’s instinctive reaction is to call the priest, insistent that the devil is in the baby and crossing herself. Jenna begs her not to and though the moment is played for a joke, transitioning to Dean unknowingly completing the second half of the Ghostbusters joke, the actions of Soulless!Jenna immediately made me feel much more uneasy about this reaction from her. To go back to Jenna smashing the angels, I think there’s a subtle background story of Jenna’s sense of oppression over her religious upbringing vs her queerness, as these are some of the only facts we have about her back story it’s hard not to mix them together. 

Her grandmother, although loved as family, with Jenna’s emotional side removed she was quick to act on old resentment. Jenna says “I always wanted to try this” when she goes to kill her grandmother, showing us that the inclination to kill her didn’t  _just_  come from being soulless but had its roots in something deeper in Jenna, again something which made me instantly suspicious that Jenna wasn’t meant to be read as just casually a little psychopathic and that there must have been more between her and her grandmother to inspire her to murder. After all in 11x01 she was genuinely upset about her panicked response to kill the road crew so while it shows she had it in her to shoot them, her remorse and compassion afterwards showed she wasn’t a killer by nature.

We also know that the grandma called the priest anyway despite the fact that Jenna begged her not to, since Crowley is there before Dean, so clearly the grandmother still puts her own beliefs over Jenna’s insistence that Dean can help alone. Again we’re not shown this conflict, merely shown its aftermath. To me there’s a subtle suggestion through this that the Grandmother has relied on the priest over Jenna before. One of the remaining strands in Western society of genuinely “monstrous” sexuality is the idea of “pray the gay away” or something which can occur in extreme Christian belief, and there’s a pervasive culture of religious families rejecting their queer children or it being a struggle for them to come out and be reconciled into the family because of the belief that homosexuality is somehow unchristian: in that sense Amara as a potentially “devil” possessed baby becomes a direct parallel to Jenna, being the monstrous creature in her own home. (This strand of the episode has been [paralleled to The Exorcist](http://larinah.tumblr.com/post/131302225182/so-i-think-ill-just-end-my-commentary-on-the) which did similar with the more general themes just of monstrous femininity and a girl’s puberty causing the disruption in the home)

Symbolically, then, heading off to her grandmother’s room to smash all her angels, Jenna is signposting the side of her grandmother that caused her to WANT to kill her. After all, soulless people do not have to immediately want to kill everyone around them for no reason. S!Sam admits he really couldn’t care less about Dean if he’s honest, but he never attempts to kill him despite all their serious wobbles like the vampire incident - S!Sam values Dean’s ability as a hunter, something that’s a solid fact he knew about him, so his lack of care was an assumption that Dean would be fine but it wouldn’t affect him if he did die so these risks were easy to take. Especially compared to 9x17, Mother’s Little Helper, with the town full of soulless people where the cold open featured in particular someone laying into their husband and killing him for something she presumably never would have (some grievance over a meatloaf or something?) but lost all restraint not to, so we know that soulless people can quickly act on their desire to harm others if there’s no morality interceding. The married couple may have had some long-standing issues that normally the wife could tolerate until there was nothing stopping her when the latest annoyance occurred. This gives us some solid examples that soulless people may be inclined towards not valuing human life (after all Sam killed a lot of people or recklessly endangered them as he lacked all compassion, and attempted to kill Bobby with pretty much stated “it’s not personal” to how the soulless side of him felt about committing fratricide) but that soulless people do remember their past emotions, and will act on old grudges or things that irritated them in life with the disproportionate amount of response. 

Now, to take this back to the Cas parallel, though the angels are torturing him for information on Metatron, it feels much more like he is on trial for his relationship with the Winchesters. The sequence starts with Dean attempting to phone Cas, and the angels rolling their eyes like of course Cas’s phone would be ringing because  _Dean Winchester_. He’s challenged again for his loyalty to Heaven vs always picking the Winchesters, even so far as being asked what he even is and being denied the right to identify as part of their family when he says that he is an Angel of the Lord. As part of the torture they threaten to start cutting bits off, and include a rather personal threat to actually make Cas “junkless” like Dean’s been accusing the angels of all these years. 

Again, concerning just the symbolism of it rather than the thought that, well, yeah, that would hurt, the angels are making [a point](http://yarnyfan.tumblr.com/post/131213663493/the-luckless-lord-no-dont-threaten-cass) of threatening Cas that way. (there’s some better meta on this [here](http://princessniitza.tumblr.com/post/131408684706/while-i-agree-with-this-meta-and-this-meta-i-have) [here](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/131287137988/eeny-meenie-miney-mo) and [here](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fthursdayschild.co.vu%2Fpost%2F131350648823%2Fthe-cas-torture-scene-really-struck-me-for-obvious&t=MGNmYjE0MDM2ZGE2ODA5YWY1ZWRlMmQ3ZDNiYTVhM2Q5M2Y1ODZjZixCUUl4ZlVkYQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AEoTmUHpiEEiE91JGAXVv3Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Felizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F131486119228%2Fjenna-angels&m=1)) Combined with the dialogue of the torture, it ties together the idea that they are linking Cas’s interest in (Dean) the Winchesters and his constant inability to choose Heaven in that way, and subtextually linking it to the idea that he may have a taboo to angels desire (to lean all the way back to 8x22 (also written by Dabb) and the nephilim proving that humans and angels aren’t meant to mix in Heaven’s eyes). So Cas too, like Jenna, is in an oppressive “home” environment where Heaven is now actually voting against him and rejecting him entirely for the choices that he has made with his loyalties, the text to the unspoken subtext about why Jenna may have killed her grandmother immediately on losing her soul. 

Cas under the attack dog spell has little choice about fighting and killing people despite how he constantly wishes to not kill any more angels, and just like Jenna would never have actually killed her grandmother in the normal course of things Cas ends up surrounded by dead angels again, just like Soulless!Jenna smashing all her grandmother’s statues. 

I suppose the last bit of hope is that Jenna threw the last angel she meant to smash to Dean and he caught it - an angel that was already cupped in protective hands:  

and at the end of the episode Cas is back with them and it seems like 11x03 might actually be focussed all around trying to fix Cas and break him from the paralled state to Jenna’s soullessness (that causes him to kill the angels as she smashes hers), so he moves on beyond this mirrored moment. 

* * *

> **Anonymous**  asked:
> 
> That meta on soulless!Jenna vs regular!Jenna who was lovely & a hero, along with your thoughts on why she lashed out against her grandmother, which I totally agree with, made me think about the parallels we could draw to demon!Dean, also clear of a conscience (at least where past resentment is involved) & inhibitions, going after Sam + how that relates to Dean & Jenna's queerness. Obviously it's not Sam's fault John was an abusive shit, more of a drill sergeant than a father, who forced his preconceived notions of what a man should be onto his children, but John wasn’t there, Sam was, and Dean’s parentification meant he unfortunately felt stifled&repressed by Sam’s expectations as well, or what he perceived Sam’s expectations to be(which were above&beyond those of a simple sibling), as the line “you sucked the life outta my life” implies. Gives a whole new meaning to “I like the disease”, too. 

Yeah, there were some blatant dialogue & costuming parallels between soulless!Jenna and demon!Dean :D

(Sorry, I literally just had to ride out an assault from a visual migraine and my thoughts tentatively feel fine and my headache isn’t here yet, but I’m disclaimering this reply anyway for possible muddledness or dropped thoughts or literally forgetting what you said to me in the first place despite my best efforts not to just answer this with your own comment but more rambling. :P)

While I’m quickly losing amusement with Crowley’s continued survival and the [new tone of the Dean x Crowley stuff](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/131252075913/i-dont-know-if-i-missed-it-bc-im-not-following) and I’m always wary of how easily the way these themes are explored can wobble towards even (hopefully) accidental unfortunate implications of monstrous queerness as a bad thing, season 10 did use the tease of probable Dean/Crowley howling at the moon stuff to fill in a certain bingo square for demon!Dean’s temporary freedom from all his old restrictions. I kind of don’t think it was a coincidence to have Crowley reminding us of that sneaky subtext subplot (alliteration! \o/) in 11x02 even if it came across much more as an abuse implication with extended hindsight on the fact they’re absolutely definitely broken up now for real (Dean sort of semi-deliberately left Crowley on the hook for most of season 10 because he was useful as far as I can tell, and even towards the end of the season wasn’t exactly trying to kill him on sight). Anyway, yeah, that’s a thing that is in the show and was a part of the latest episode, and therefore probably a part of the parallel we’re supposed to be drawing.

Regarding Sam, I agree that Sam sort of accidentally becomes the thing that represents that oppression to Dean - in a way, largely just because he’s trying to fix him in 10x03 and Dean’s reacting to that, though of course he has a lot to say in their big dramatic exchange while demon!Dean is tied up. I seem to remember in that that, Sam was pretty much forced on the defensive to family and everything including John, just because Dean was on the attack. Which can cause a kind of reactive defence just because Sam doesn’t exactly wholly hate John so Dean lashing out causes him to instinctively protect their ideas of family, when Sam obviously has expressed his own criticisms plenty of times in the past. But yeah, in that moment, it makes Sam representative of the oppressive system of their family to Dean, especially with the emphasis on saving Dean by dragging him back in line and forcing him to become human again against his will and basically inflicting human emotions on him from one perspective. :P And as with Jenna, Dean wouldn’t wholly disown the family - especially Sam - as his normal self because that’s practically the opposite of his values when he has an undamaged soul, but like with Jenna killing her grandmother (her being a Dean mirror through wardrobe choices alone killing a Sam mirror through wardrobe choices alone) adding in old grievances for anything to a total lack of care, and you get the same basic effect.

(Am I remembering right that when demon!Dean got loose he almost picked up a knife like the kitchen knife Jenna used, before settling on his more character appropriate blunt instrument? There was a moment of having her hesitate to pick out the desired weapon from the knife holder thingy anyway.)

I do think that over season 10 while Dean was wildly yo-yoing around trying to keep himself under control, we had some moments where he really did try to demonstrate that he was trying to break out from under the practically self-imposed sense of oppression - I ended up answering an ask ages ago which I think says it better than I could right now about how I kind of see his mindset in relation to all this and how Sam can be sort of accidentally keeping him in this oppressed mindset just by existing in his general vicinity thanks to Dean’s programming: <http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/122765353203/hi-so-this-has-been-bugging-me-for-awhile-but-do>

Somehow my “dean vs cake” and “swiftie!Dean” tags are semi-serious meta tags (and sorry if you’ve been reading meta all through season 10 because this is just going over some old ground that was widely discussed to explain what I’m talking about because it’s a sort of nonsense thing without the explanation so I’m going to type it all out anyway…), but essentially, there’s 2 moments that really stand out to me in season 10 to do with Dean struggling against this as he tries to reconcile his own sense of self after being a demon (this is kind of what I feel the theme of season 10 was, in the same way that the “big bad” was the Mark of Cain and all in all it was something that probably worked better in theory but there’s plenty to write about it all, at least. :P) - the cake thing is from 10x12/15 where first Dean ate some cake and seemed to like it, but was warned off it, and then randomly pretended to hate the cake when recounting the incident to Sam, though he’d actually liked it until someone told him not to eat it (and it hadn’t even been poisoned)… And then a few episodes later there’s cake on offer and Sam actively denies Dean eating any of it, probably to keep up appearances because Dean and what table manners, but anyway, it all builds up this picture through metaphor of how Dean could like something but be discouraged by society in general and Sam in particular from having it, and then with him pretending he doesn’t even like it anyway, showing how Dean builds his outer shell of presenting contrary opinions to how he actually feels about stuff. The first instance has him doing it unprompted in front of Sam, the other Sam’s an active participant, although presumably completely unaware of all the meta that got written about the cake the first time around a few episodes before :P And then there’s the Taylor Swift incident where Dean (in 10x12 again as the contrast to the cake thing) actively chooses to listen to a pop song he’d already made a fuss about how he wasn’t supposed to like it. Again, he checks against Sam before making his decision, but decides to ignore how Sam is looking at him and enjoy himself, presenting a positive alternative though still showing that Sam’s opinion weighs on Dean’s decisions on how to present himself. 

There were other little bits all over season 10 I guess which fitted into these sort of themes - I remember a fair amount of discussion anyway - so I think it sort of shows both that Dean does still have all the repression, obviously, and to continue with the idea that Sam put it back on him literally by curing him of being a demon and removing his “free” state it links Sam to the emotional oppression Dean feels as well through these examples even in very subtle ways like Dean glancing at Sam to check his reaction. Of course for Sam there was the whole constant panic of the entire of season 10 worrying about Dean deteriorating back into being a demon so any change in behaviour for good or bad was potentially alarming, so it was a terrible atmosphere for self-discovery, never mind Dean’s internal issues through the season. :P

The whole soulless!Jenna parallel basically just re-trod the ground of demon!Dean in 10x03 though, along with giving her a baby that she was burdened with to sort of fast-forward through the entire Sam-as-Dean’s-kid metaphor as a lifetime thing in 2 days for her (the other Jenna meta I reblogged discussed how that her being given Amara might have been less positive in the moment, soul-sucking monster baby thing aside). And, like you said, Dean literally accuses Sam of that in so many words, to actually consider the whole soul-sucking monster baby thing. The more you poke at Jenna vs demon!Dean the less unsubtle it gets… Anyway, for her, she was then killed while again Dean got to move on from that moment, as often the mirrors in the story get the worst possible outcome for them, and that’s used to explore the outcomes for the characters and serve as a sort of warning maybe. You could say Dean moved past it or you could say that him being put back “human” kind of killed that free side of him. Of course, being like 2 days free of the Mark of Cain by then, he’s really only just been completely put back to normal… The threat of demon!Dean is finally gone from the narrative (for now?) and so this mirrored character being killed off could be representing the end of that threat, while reminding us of what demon!Dean did bring to the table in terms of discussing Dean’s character development.

Since he’s now “back to normal” (if that can ever actually be a thing for them :P) perhaps I’m being over-hopeful because of the strength of the Sam stuff in 11x02 and their conversation from 11x01 (I know some people are already upset that there’s more secrets and stuff but it feels like it was to a more positive end and Sam was allowed to survive and significantly, by looking after himself and being extremely capable), but maybe now it’s the time to try and explore what that means for Dean by following on from what all this exploration of the character was saying, and maybe start trying to apply it in the same way but to the “normal” Dean? I dunno. Like, if Jenna did her duty as a mirror to take us back to the 10x03 conversation, it’s reminding us that these issues lurk under the surface, but Dean is now finally in a place where he may be allowed positive character development that the Mark of Cain arc sort of allowed him to have random moments of, but always under a hanging sword and with some wild swings in other directions followed by a total personality breakdown at the end of the season. So the reminder comes to put those themes back on the table without having to force Dean to say all that stuff again for the sake of picking back up and carrying on. Or something.

* * *

Oh yeah, the “Mom?!” part of 2x20 obviously reminded me inescapably of our hiatus cliffhanger… What comes after made me wibbly and emotional:

([x](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/143214130997/demondetoxmanual-what-is-and-what-should-never)) … Obviously in season 2 that’s set up with 2x13 and Dean’s whole ~thing~ with angels is funnelled right through his experiences with Mary, and angels, to Dean, are ABOUT Mary right then, because they’re just an abstract concept she believed in. 

This line is just a way for him to prove to himself that it’s Mary, but what about in season 12? (I know she supposedly decks him immediately, but later :P) Like… Can Dean even  _ask_  her that now? Could he bear to hear Mary tell him that? Or would he want to hear it, and all his crappy experiences with Heaven and other angels aside, NOW what Cas means to him is what his MAIN experience of angels is, would he ask Mary that same question just to hear the answer?

* * *

 

>  [mittensmorgul](http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/149382737145)

> You made me bleed my own blood. Here, I’ll make it worse:
> 
> 5.13, Mary rubs her belly and tells unborn Dean that angels are watching over him:
> 
> And then in 11.02 the angel that’s always been watching over him since before he was born is in danger:
> 
> She’s already smashed a number of other little angels, but Dean is able to catch this one.
> 
> It kinda-sorta sends him crashing onto the bed, but Dean does save that one angel.
> 
> But would Dean think that asking Mary that question now might be as good a way as any to segue into explaining the dude they’re about to meet up with… and then they suddenly pull over to the side of the road to pick up a scruffy looking guy in a rumpled trench coat.

* * *

 … completely unrelated, except for how it is, I haven’t thought about that Jenna and the angels thing since 11x02 was new! (Well, I think maybe when Cas got possessed we brought it back up that Dean WOULD save him) so I’d just like to say he actually did facilitate Cas’s rescue to the best of his ability with a failed attempt in 11x18 and a near self-sacrifice in 11x21 to finally get it done. 

The ‘lil angel from 5x13 is more complicated than that though, because the “angels are watching over you” line THERE may be great for Destiel shipping, but it’s also laden with irony about Michael and Lucifer looming over Sam and Dean’s destinies and ensuring their births so the big fight can happen. That angel ALREADY had a double meaning from season 5, then in season 11 Amara goes around smashing up all the angels, but Dean saves  _Casifer_  from under her nose, so it was just as double-meany in season 11 too.

…

But in the vision she sends Dean it’s not Lucifer she “throws” at him to save, it’s definitely Cas…

… kinda :P 

 


	4. Bi Bar Signs

**Anonymous**  asked:

Do you have a meta on the bisexual colored sign behind Cesar in the bar that Dean is looking straight at?

Aah I just saw this post

<http://fallenfortherighteous.tumblr.com/post/143522709488/can-we-just-talk-for-a-sec-about-that-beautiful-bi>

(I’m gonna steal their screencap because lazy even though I literally have the episode open on the other monitor next to me :P)

We don’t learn a whole lost about Cesar or Jesse although we know he’d been interested in guys since he was smol, so he seems more likely to easily say he’s probably gay. I like Cesar having these colours next to him since he could be bi for all we know since we learn literally nothing about his personal life, even stuff like how he became a hunter… I think the only thing he ever said about himself even in the conversation about revenge with Dean was that he had no siblings, so like, deliberate absence of any backstory or any exploration of his character outside the case… which I liked because as people have been saying, this was like, not a big deal: the point was to show you could have hunter husbands and the only thing it would affect was that we’d know they were married. Cesar’s role was as the partner in the case and in this case partner = husband but as other people have already said, that can also be brother like with Sam and Dean, or best friends like Bobby and Rufus, for examples of partnerships we’ve seen contrasted this season.

Anyway it’s also reminded me of [this](http://almaasi.tumblr.com/post/130732974255/wigglebox-im-serious-how-i-didnt-get-love):

Jenna from the opening of the season next to the little rainbow chart on the wall. In 11x01 we were like, !!! lol Jenna is gay just because of that sign, and lo and behold in 11x02 she reveals her first kiss and/or whoever she lost her virginity to was another girl

so again like with how people are saying (I’ve seen 2 posts already and barely cracked my dash) we pegged them as husbands just from the promo stuff, before we even knew they shared a surname, and a misconception they were brothers (life imitates art, right? :P) we’d assumed they were a couple and holding out hope that they were because it seemed to be the most obvious reading (with the other being heteronormativity or, in fandom, pessimism that hunter husbands would actually happen) - our reading was validated and it turns out we correctly identified all the queer characters so far this season off hints and context clues. 

And then since we already KNOW Cesar is a dude who is married to another dude, this sign works as a very different sort of identifier?

… I mean I’ve also already seen this episode and Dean’s reaction to “ooh! Not brothers!” paralleled to his response in 8x23 to the cupid’s choice of target, and if we’re talking about scenes where Dean had a blue and purple neon light behind him, I don’t think you have to look any further? :P


	5. Baby's POV

##  [Baby’s POV…](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/133435399993/babys-pov)

… okay that’s a title with 2 meanings: Baby as a “character” was the point of view for the episode by the means of the cameras (and there’s a lot to say in the clever way they were used to show a neutral or legitimately “car” POV), but I actually feel like discussing the POV in the episode Baby in a more nuanced way to do with the actual characters and narrative. I was thinking it from the moment I started watching, and I think in a way this apparently “neutral” POV actually shows us a lot about the basic way point of view is used in general on the show.

I have been privately harping on this to myself for a week, but eh, here we go.

First of all, me being me and sitting on 12 viewpoints all the time (she says while talking about point of view), I do actually feel like I wholly agree with this post as well:

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/132302754138/the-case-of-baby>

which outlines the way the narrative works to make it about Baby beyond just where the cameras are and that makes sense because technically and narratively it was Baby’s POV. But I was also thinking of an answer to this reply from [@nerdylittleshit](http://tmblr.co/mW6ahfN15lAp5M06KOvinNA) here:

<http://nerdylittleshit.tumblr.com/post/132503761717/its-interesting-how-despite-all-the-growth-we-saw>

where I briefly talked about how the episode was more about Dean because of an anon asking about Sam’s treatment, and Jules replied:

> Another thing: the reason 11x04 focused more on Dean than Sam, especially towards the end, was to me simply explained with the fact that the car of course is more associated with Dean rather than Sam. It is Dean’s Baby after all. I think by now it is meta canon that Baby represents Dean’s soul; everything that happens to Dean happens to his car as well. 

For the sake of not making that post any longer I’m making another long post (but at least one all about this :P) - it’s basically just a recap of the episode focussing on POV or which character is in focus, to come to the usual conclusion that Dean is the POV character who does the most driving and Sam gets the myth arc stuff, which is in a way the old way things used to run on the show where Sam would provide POV specifically for the arc, and Dean covered the emotional side.

I actually deleted my own first watch notes because they were incomprehensible (I was dizzy and sick and I ended up making posts covering most of the individual comments anyway) but haven’t posted my initial thoughts after I managed to watch just the very opening before my video ended up buffering for five minutes, and the summary of my thoughts was basically, “I know I’m not exactly prone to asking this, but where’s Sam?” (I swear I am not one of the people out there agitating for the idea that no Sam on screen is ‘Sam erasure’ or something, but it left me curious).

Basically all the PR about this episode felt like it was about it being very much about the brothers (which it also surprised everyone pleasantly for having an alarming amount of Cas for an episode he wasn’t even “in”) but within even the opening recap we have the usual emphasis on Dean x Baby, and Dean in 5x03 to reintroduce (sneakily) John as Matt Cohen (in a pretty much Sam-less episode) by association of Dean doing the sales pitch of Baby to him. Obviously no one is saying Dean isn’t the one more connected to Baby, but the recap also skips the moment in Swan Song where Sam is most connected to the Impala and the memories jammed into its ashtray (again, noticing plot bias in the recap, perhaps to try to not influence theories that it *has* to be Lucifer later, but it was the significant built up and POINT to the emphasis on the car within Swan Song’s narrative), and like with Fan Fiction last season, it basically therefore relied on fans to remember for themselves the significance of the episode starting on legos, army man, and the initials. Like, a kind of “this is so iconic we’re not going to recap it, so if you don’t know what we’re looking at in the first seconds of new footage than you’re just not going to get it.”

Though we start with the SW DW initials, the actual first character (aside from the car) on screen is Dean in the back of the car, and as the above linked post about the “Case of Baby” explains, while the opening shots do all the work to make us ask what happened to Baby in the first few seconds, we still also skip from Dean in a similar messed up state in her backseat (metaphors about their connection very obviously gone over a LOT by now) to Baby being cleaned, and again Dean on screen with her, and again no Sam at first. He has to walk into shot, from Baby’s limited POV, while the very first visual once the episode proper starts is Dean viewed through all the soap suds, basically once again appearing “attached” to Baby in a way that Sam isn’t by the fact he’s immediately in the introductory shot of the scene. Sam coming in joins in with the washing belatedly, sort of attaching himself to the moment (this can be seen in reverse in many episodes which start with Sam researching in the Bunker and Dean wanders into shot presumably from his room, and starts asking questions about what they’re doing next - 11x05 immediately after was much more Sam biased and started this way, while 11x06 held a more genuinely neutral POV split storyline with equal weight on all 3 main characters (plus Crowley and Amara’s storyline) and started with Sam and Dean on screen together).

Once we’re on the road it seems to be the more the neutral POV with the brothers in the car (as advertised!) and then we have the moment very soon into the drive [where we break format](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/132470463383/bisexualdeanwinchester-baby-was-such-a-great): you could have them driving and discussing the case in any episode, but there’s a pause where we should go to the next scene, and don’t, and we start to see some of the mundane stuff that never makes it into a normal episode (this is where my low-key dread of the episode turned into outright skin crawling for basically the next 20 minutes of screen time because I can’t cope with fly on the wall second hand embarrassment of the absolutely staggering invasion of privacy this felt like to me thanks to this way it was filmed, so perhaps I was latching onto non-Baby POV while watching for the sake of… not dealing with this :P). Immediately we have an example of something which plays a part in establishing the secondary POV of Dean within Baby - Sam catches Dean out with the presence of the smoothies, where Dean had no idea that Sam had packed them. It comes as a surprise pulled from within Baby, and Dean is the recipient of the surprise, therefore as the viewer, we are more with Dean as Sam was the one withholding information (even just about the presence of smoothies) while Dean is used to question this and be the viewpoint asking for more information, which in the case of any plot discussion, the character who knows the least about the situation the viewer is also going into blind will also be the POV so that we essentially ride on their shoulders in terms of what we both know. Silly example. Sets the scene.

To contrast, as they pull into the roadhouse, we get an establishing shot first, if blurry, and THEN Sam expressing a quick range of negative emotions towards it: Dean is driving and in control and we see from Baby’s sight the approach of the roadhouse but Dean’s aware that it’s there and that’s where they were going. If we were making this on Sam, it would have been his eyes to roadhouse to expressing confusion, but instead the neutrality of the shot plays into Dean being more “in charge” and it’s not presented as a surprise because of the order of the establishing shot bringing us in on where we’re going (and knowing Dean as we do, what the expectation is of this) before Sam has fully understood it.

And then we have a neutral time skip where the angle conceals the backseat from us, seeming to sort of rest on the bench looking forwards, we get the camera focussing on Dean leaving and returning, followed by Sam’s hook up with Piper being used to play on our expectations and surprise us that it was Sam who had the hook up, all of which relies on us not knowing a thing about what Sam was up to until  _after_  we’ve met Piper and she’s surprised Dean, and in turn us. Dean ([creepily](http://iwatchthepie.tumblr.com/post/132559830162/yeah-sams-hookup-with-piper-is-still-bugging-me)) leaves and we once again cut for Sam’s modesty, basically, back to the next time Dean is in the car and they’re discussing it. Once again the nature of the surprise and the fact that the interaction is all dependant on Dean’s presence while Sam was… aware of events… the entire time makes it a solidly Dean POV within the apparently more neutral eye of Baby, just because of what moments of time were chosen to be shown, and her “eye” turned towards the Roadhouse where Dean was, similarly making a focus on what he was up to in the intervening time which, until the reveal about Sam, who is covered by the explanation he’s researching, makes the time skip focus on Dean’s off-screen actions as a cover for Sam’s.

So basically five minutes into the episode’s proper run time, everything that has happened establishing the “normal” and “mundane” POV of the episode has all been strongly slanted towards it being still  _about_  Dean in way more particulars than just because it’s his car. 

We go back to the more “neutral” viewpoint where you can justify it pretty much being Baby’s POV for the rest of the drive until Sam is asleep. At which point we’re technically still in the car, but we’re actually in Sam’s head so we’ve actually in a way broken the format of the episode - which is fitting as it’s an intrusion of the mytharc into the MotW episode. I suppose maybe Baby can see into their heads if you really want to continue saying it’s all from her point of view. :P Anyway, Sam has dreamed himself into the front passenger seat when we know he’s actually in the backseat, so it’s not even an “accurate” misrepresentation of the seating arrangement. The dream is obviously just Sam’s POV, not Baby’s, even if the camera lurks inside her with the same framing as the rest of the episode (making use of how they set her up for so many angles I guess :P). So we get the same sort of thing as the opening section where the POV is set up as Baby’s POV but Dean’s the one who’s sort of got the narrative POV. We also get flashes of Sam’s vision from 11x02 which also breaks format completely by showing us stuff completely away from the car/so internal to Sam we can’t see the car any more (take your pick). This is delivering mytharc stuff to us directly from Sam, and it’s important that we can ONLY learn it directly from Sam, as Dean isn’t present.

The next scene once Sam wakes up is once again Dean’s POV finding out what Sam dreamed about, as it’s introduced by him not knowing what Sam dreamed about (even though we do) for the impact of him telling us that Sam was singing and basically verifying what not-John said. The lead-in to it is once again slanted towards what Dean doesn’t know, so even though we already know about it from Sam, the emotional hook comes from Dean’s side, and it is his dream that is allowed to be described in full, which also puts the weight on him having the emotional burden in the scene as he is the one who splurges more (even if he cuts off Sam).

From there we finally get to the case, and it’s not long before Sam and Dean separate and Dean stays with the car while Sam is dropped off to investigate something else, giving us a long stretch of uninterrupted Dean. Dean picks Sam up and gets him up to date with the plot, and then when they stop once more Sam steps out of the car, and we get a shot looking from within Baby, through her windows, and then through a further window of the Gas n Sip, watching Sam mutely from afar as Dean has an emotionally pertinent moment about family looking at Sam as well for a moment from this distance, that Sam is not privy to. And then once again they are separated, and Sam is left behind with Dean covering the rest of the dramatic conclusion, Sam excluded and by the format of the episode literally not allowed to be caught up with, which gets us back to the opening teaser which made me initially wonder what had happened to Sam. 

What’s more when we finally catch up with him at the end, it’s 2 complex Dean emotional things we’re left on while Sam is happy for A: Cas to heal them of their new bumps and cuts, and B: has a long-standing and unchallenged view of the car as home (”never in fact homeless” echoing from Swan Song), Dean is in the middle of a complicated mostly unspoken emotional tangle with Cas over the healing issue and has to reluctantly agree to it as a short term resolution to the longer arc, ongoing both sides of this although shifted to Cas in 11x06, and he also poses the contradiction that his idea of “home” has shifted over this time in contrast to Sam’s opinion, although this one is left mostly unstated except in the fact the contradiction is put on screen, it is once again making us look towards Dean and see what he is thinking, while Sam’s view is fairly well entrenched in the show’s surface layers (again, literally stated in Swan Song so that’s 5 full seasons of it being main text that the car is home) and only in the negative space when you start overthinking the moment are there other things about how he *hasn’t* settled elsewhere. 

I dunno, I just found it really interesting that Baby did have some biases. It feels fairly clear that there are few Sam-favouring writers on the show at the moment, and Robbie tends towards favouring Dean most of the time. This may be internal biases at work, but especially since after this episode 11x05 came along and felt strongly like the first time in a while you could identify that Nancy Won has a Sam!girl bias over Dean, I’m really quite interested in the way it’s been manifesting itself, especially as the overall arc has favoured Dean ever since the Mark of Cain (… an arc kicked off BY Robbie) the question of whose POV and whose mytharc is back on the table.

While Sam and Dean are both connected it’s interesting that Sam is getting the plot stuff (mysterious visions connected to very high level stuff, like God as he thinks, or maybe something else…) and Dean is the one who is struggling with emotional issues - the remaining suffering he has to do over the Mark of Cain being transferred to Amara as the new external source of that same thing he struggled with. And this episode in its own small way demonstrated the way the storyline is often written with Sam’s POV only strongly asserting itself for the huge mytharc moments, while Dean literally runs away with the rest of it.


	6. The blood handprint of 11x04

> **[iheartthoreau](https://iheartthoreau.tumblr.com/)**  asked:
> 
> I cant stop thinking about that hand smacking the windshield and smearing the blood. We know what happened last time dean was in a car with an angel and that happened. How do I connect these 2 scenes?

> The handprint also brought to mind the last time dean was jn the impala with an angel and she smeared here hand on the glass .. 
> 
> * * *

Argh this same thing is appearing on my dash faster than I can read or respond to it (I am very spacey tonight I’m running on 8 hours sleep in 3 days of anxiety soaked migraine-y hell at this point and I’m apologising for all the terrible blogging this week >.>)

This is how it looked when I started typing:

<http://postmodernmulticoloredcloak.tumblr.com/post/132231639802/i-cant-even-what-yall>

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/132216224793/messier666-so-general-fandom-consensus-is-that>

I love the plain old visual of Dean’s Baby that so often [represents his soul](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/131073702839/martyrdean-deanmeme-reoccurring-themes-34) getting a red handprint on it because that is one of the most evocative images in Destiel fandom in particular but even just the show in general… There was some discussion a little while back about the handprint and I think I came down on the side that I like the idea it’s sort of still there in spirit anyway, which fits this image of it appearing on his exterior manifestation of his soul. :P You can find all my recent blathering about the handprint in this suspiciously named tag:

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/tagged/Dean%27s-elbow-fetish-for-ts>

I also think it’s really interesting that the episode had Sam hooking up in the backseat and then this weird terrible reverse of the original Anna and Dean scene with with the hand of the monster on the outside smearing its own blood rather than the condensation from their steamy moment… lol. I guess if we’re using this to reflect on Dean, the handprint is more a sort of bloody reminder than anything - after the shock of the fight with him driving around with it still it sort of loses the horror of the moment and just becomes a “lol why is that even still on there?” thing as everyone laughs about the blood being left behind (probably I felt on first watch just because they wanted to show the attrition on the car so if they blew out ALL the windows the impact of her nice car wash being ruined by the blood splatter would be lost as we wouldn’t see it, but then it starts doing this double duty with more meaning when you dig deeper). 

The Sam thing is interesting just because my original take on the Dean x Anna thing was that it sort of creates an erotic love triangle between Dean, Cas and Anna in season 4 with the hook up as a proxy to Dean n Cas hooking up which I… have rambled about  _extensively._ Gah. :P (I assume this might be why you’re asking me in particular but I’m going to link all this in case anyone missed my break down over it all this summer and also because like I said migraine bleh this cuts down original thought in this reply by relying on past me :P) But yeah, Sam was sort of… picking up from Dean in a lot of ways this episode, some of which included being the one who hooked up, and I think one of those posts about this episode I linked mentions that 4x10 and 11x04 are so far the only times a hook up in Baby has occurred in the episode.

Anyway here’s all the links to the discussion from over the summer I had about this. (Not in a shippy way exactly but this all sort of covers Dean x Cas x Anna as an erotic love triangle, just advance warning/disclaimers and this is very based off my reading of what was meant to be implied at the time of each episode not like a whole scope of hindsight thing because there are Cas x Anna things to consider but only within 4x10 or maybe in the subtext of season 4, really, and then duly ignored from everything after, and I don’t ship any of it but Dean x Cas so… point of conversation only :P … I have a lot more followers than when I was posting this first time hence all the fresh disclaimering >.>)

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/125264050903/spn-hellatus-rewatch-4x10-or-basically-just>

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/126533671043/considering-what-we-know-now-of-cas-past-i-like>

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/126580619848/holy-trinity-ehem-i-mean-wow-interestingly>

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/126616277093/whats-the-importance-of-cas-insisting-dean-to-say>

Anyway the upshot of all that is that I linked the 3 of them at the point of the Dean x Anna hook up with her doing the thing where she puts her hand over the handprint - it’s ironic that her hand is the one sliding down the glass in 4x10 (I think?? You know I have never questioned that it was her) and it’s Cas’s handprint ON Dean, but in this episode Deputy Dumbass does all the steps of bleeding everywhere, smearing his hand down the side, and leaving the lasting mark. :P I guess sort of combining it just as much as Cas and Anna’s roles blurred. I also argued in one or two of those posts that Anna was a sort of erotic proxy for Cas because Dean needed a heavenly hook up to parallel Sam/Ruby and for that they couldn’t keep paralleling Cas and Dean as Sam to Ruby, so Anna is drafted in to take one for the team, hence the original plan for her to only be in those 2 episodes before they decided to continue with her character for a while after. 

(One of those posts, if you didn’t stop to read my entire season 4 re-watch, is amended with a very long essay on this whole “Cas stole Anna’s story arc” thing, which I have opinions on :P)

ANYWAY adding up the fact that both scenes used proxies for the Dean/Cas stuff, like, even the fact that Sam talking about what Dean wants romantically can easily be seen as Sam talking about what he also wants, especially as he leads in musing sadly that Piper didn’t give him her phone number. I saw someone comparing this conversation to the one in Swap Meat, which was our first suggestion of foreshadowing that Dean was going to end up with Lisa after the apocalypse, and in that conversation Dean raised the subject first and Sam, being much more in the state of mind that he was going to die because of this apocalypse thing/didn’t have the luxury to think about it, kind of just was like “Nah” (I already don’t really remember exactly because who retains Swap Meat in their long-term memory willingly? :P) and Dean was left looking sort of pensive on it because obviously it was the build up to him going to Lisa and Ben. Obviously this time around it’s Sam bringing it up and Dean shooting it down.

There’s already a lot of foreshadowing that Sam may be the slightly more potentially dead Winchester at the end of the season (I mean they can still surprise us I guess…) and at least over on the more Dean-focussed side of the fandom on my dash everyone’s focussing on his reaction anyway, so Sam’s experience with Piper and then raising the question at Dean, along with the various incidents in the episode linking us back to 4x10 in a fragmented gory way, do kind of turn Sam’s hook up into a reminder of Dean x Anna, which in turn through the handprint had its links to Cas… (And also Dean’s interaction with Cas over the episode and Dean and Sam’s final disconnect over what “home” was add up over 11x04) 

SO I am kind of taking it all as a whole bundle of reminders. The handprint is WAY more strongly a DeanCas thing because, well, it was Cas’s handprint on Dean, and the parallel hook up is probably more… idk mood setting than anything? :P At least this is how I’m feeling it: it just helps put in mind “lol the last time someone did that was Dean and Anna” if you’re counting. The actual strong visual is to the handprint. 

ALSO to kind of discard most of that rambling, I am interested in how it’s so bloody and kind of… caused by the fight. Like, Dean n Cas’s history has only been MORE bloody since season 4, but the whole emotional arc over these episodes since 10x22 has been about Dean’s regret for beating Cas up, and then Cas beating DEAN up and then we go into this episode with Dean refusing to be healed and a whole lot of sulking. I did say both at the end of 11x03 as speculation and then again about the start of this episode I got the feeling Dean and Cas were kind of actively avoiding each other in the Bunker, hence Dean hiding in the garage (FUNNY AS THE JOKES ABOUT HIM AND CAS AND THE SHORTS ARE). This episode started the Dean n Cas stuff with clearly bringing up that Cas wanted to heal him and Dean wouldn’t let him, had a load of extra nice stuff in the middle where they work as a team blah blah Dean is guilt-tripped into letting Cas heal him at last at the end, so his background emotional arc to the episode was this as it was pretty much the start and finish of his emotional stuff on-screen for the episode. 

Anyway THAT is a really long-winded way to say that I feel like all this, especially the recent arc but also their Carver era stuff going back to season 8 and the first Crypt Scene which kind of was a game changer between them (I may be picking on it because Robbie Thompson but like. Sue me.) they’ve been through so much violence together. BUT that handprint was a whole part of their weird bond to begin with - even when it was an uncomfortable or strange thing to start with, and stuff like the Dean x Anna thing seems to help reconcile it… Anyway blah blah handprint is the symbol of their bond, and lately it’s been re-made in blood, so we have a literal symbol of it being painted in actual blood, blah blah all the stuff about them healing and the hopeful discussion about it we’ve been promised for 11x06… 

…I think that is a fraction of what I could say about this subject anyway. :P


	7. Requiem For The Easter Bunny Episode That Wasn’t

What the hell I only get to do this once and I successfully joke-predicted that there would be an Easter Bunny monster of the week over a year ago, so [this burden falls on me](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/133365302103/omg-lizbob-i-just-saw-the-promo-and-i-swear-i). 

Let’s have a crack meta for the Easter Bunny. 

([This entire week I am pulling the same pose and face as Briana.](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/133185617454/spncastdaily-officialbrianab-i-have-lots-of))

So in the show the Easter Bunny has been referenced exactly twice before (if a quick search of Superwiki is to be trusted - my instinct from my re-watch is it was mentioned twice in season 3 but I can only find one mention).

There are a few important themes connected to the Easter Bunny within the show. 

Obviously the first is the ultimate sign of things that Do Not Exist. Like, we have had unicorns, confirmation of the tooth fairy(’s unfortunate demise), a serious investigation into Evil Santa… But so far (and presumably onwards from 11x07 once we find out what the MotW REALLY is that is not the Easter Bunny) the Easter Bunny eludes existence in the show’s mythology. It’s not even an old folkloric thing - [it’s only a few hundred years old as a concept](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/115625315193/hey-im-not-at-all-familiar-with-easter-so). (That link has a link to a source in it but this is not a serious meta so it’s not seriously sourced. :P)

Anyway, the Easter Bunny represents a concept of unreality: a concept of a mythic creature that’s been inserted into our belief system yet holds very little weight, and is abjectly absurd in principle thanks to the modern association of it to chocolate Easter eggs: even pretending it carries chicken eggs around doesn’t make sense for rabbits to be doing. Of all the random critters you could mention (now that the show has rolled with tooth fairies -  _twice_ ) the Easter Bunny is the lowest hanging fruit for being a purposefully meaningless reference.

However, even jokingly they are going to have to confront the idea of  _some_  sort of monstrous rabbit, no matter how long for, the concept is on the table and is how the episode is currently being sold to us before we see it. This feeds into the general themes that often appear in the show of the story that “everyone” knows being challenged. I.e. the Easter Bunny has been set up so much as a non-existing creature that to even entertain the idea it is literally present in a small-town police department’s holding cells is to court a challenge to the story that everyone knows. 

Furthermore, there is an ongoing theme of  _the imaginary_  within this season, as the episode following will focus on Sam’s childhood imaginary friend, Sully, abruptly turning out to be real and present. So almost in the way that the early part of season 5 had a whole run of absurd and implausible MotW leading up to Changing Channels where it turned out the nonsense factor challenging them to even speculate they may have a Trickster on their hands in I Believe the Children are the Future (the first tooth fairy episode, incidentally, and as with the unicorn,  _exactly_  the same motivation for creating it, i.e. drawn from a child’s imagination) turned out to be  _mytharc_  foreshadowing for the Trickster’s return - but not as what they had expected. 

Now children’s imaginations have been important a couple of times as I mentioned, the other being Bedtime Stories in season 3, which was about a surprisingly Snow White looking girl in a coma (now as an adult) who created the fairytale worlds around her as she dreamed and listened to the stories her father read her. Similarly, Plucky Pennywhistle’s bizarre monsters were all drawn from children’s childhood fears, with a strong focus on what Sam was most scared of (clowns). 

All of this was about the imaginary being made real, all of it ties to these nonsense themes, and all of it suddenly seems weirdly relevant to have an “Easter Bunny” monster of the week followed by an “imaginary friend” monster of the week.

It is also to Sam that these are by and large connected. Sam was more familiar with the source material in Bedtime Stories while Dean actively denied it (never mind his projecting, let’s just go with that fact the episode  _coded_  Sam as more aware of the stories), it was his childhood fears that were made real in Plucky Pennywhistle’s, and it will be  _his_  imaginary friend who is dragged out of the past the episode after. 

The two Easter Bunny references are also for Sam. In 3x07:

> GORDON  
> Sam Winchester’s the Antichrist.
> 
> BELA  
> Mmm. I’d heard something about that…
> 
> GORDON  
> It’s true.
> 
> BELA  
> … from my good friend, the Easter Bunny, who’d heard it from the Tooth Fairy.

And from 10x12:

> SAM  
> Yeah, I do know that, but staying locked up in here, sitting on the ground reading the same lore books over and over and over again, it’s not helping you. You need to get back in the game for your own good. You can beat this, Dean.
> 
> DEAN  
> Do you really believe that?
> 
> SAM  
> Yeah, you’re damn right I believe that.
> 
> DEAN  
> You know, you also believed in the Easter bunny till you were 12.
> 
> SAM  
> No I didn’t.
> 
> [SAM pauses]
> 
> Look, I was 11.
> 
> DEAN  
> And a half.
> 
> SAM  
> And a half. Right.

In both instances the Easter Bunny is invoked to mock belief, but in the first case it is to mock the belief in Sam’s inherent Darkness (word chosen carefully) while in the second Dean uses it mock Sam’s belief that Dean can overcome his Darkness (literally, as this was in the middle of him struggling with the Mark of Cain aka the Darkness).

Now, from the first reference, as we know with PLENTY of hindsight Sam was not the anti-Christ but how interesting I have already invoked the anti-Christ episode - and that being an episode where Sam strongly related to Jesse as he had just struggled through the very same dark arc that Bela was dismissing there. 

In the second interest it is Sam’s childhood beliefs that are directly referenced again, connecting him with this innocence of childhood belief - perhaps his right as the younger brother to be more innocent and protected. In the Evil Santa episode we have flashbacks to show how Dean tried to keep Sam protected from the knowledge of the bad monsters that were real, and Bedtime Stories has made it easy to headcanon that Sam had more time and luxury as the child who was raised in semi-innocence to the bad things to enjoy stuff like Disney or fairy tales without it being spoiled by the knowledge of worse things out there, contrasting Dean as the sceptic for whom cute concepts like this are meaningless and fake, or else turn up as something that he has to kill. It’s notable that in Plucky Pennywhistle’s that although he identifies with the children and with their fear, he himself is not confronted with anything from his own childhood.

The idea of these concepts is tied to innocence versus people’s inherent or carried darkness: Sam as an “evil” thing is linked to the Easter Bunny as a nonsense notion, while Dean brings up Sam’s innocence in a way of not understanding the struggle and dark spiral that Dean is in at that time, believing himself at that point to be dangerous and needing to be kept hidden away, only good to research how to save himself. It was noticeable that through season 10 as Sam became increasingly desperate it was him who was shown researching futilely in Dean’s place, as that innocence that things would be okay to, I dunno, go out and get a breath of fresh air, to just make everything better. As he confronted the idea of the darkness in Dean as a challenge to defeat and began making questionable decisions in order to save Dean with the extreme lengths he went to, that innocence disappeared. Now on the table are going to be in short succession two examples of corrupted innocence: a horrific version of the Easter Bunny to confront, and an imaginary friend suddenly made real and unavoidably present, which is a corruption of how they’re supposed to work.

On the other hand, you can look at it as regression: while Amara, the Darkness, is growing, these episodes from earlier seasons I’ve mentioned have focussed on looking back, often to things which can’t be kept or beliefs that shouldn’t have endured (even Dean admits he may have mentally scarred Sam with the clowns thing at the end of Plucky Pennywhistle’s and that he shouldn’t have had an enduring childhood fear into adulthood - especially not given the monsters they face: it’s a serious point when there’s crack posts comparing Sam’s expression around clowns vs being in a room with Lucifer)… About a Boy focussed on going backwards for Dean, and in the end the struggles of being a kid again were too much and he made the choice to take the turmoil of being an adult - darkness included - in order to continue saving people and functioning in the way he knew how, but a note of childishness endured (an innocent surface reading for the Taylor Swift moment at the end, and his later desire to eat that damn cake). Meanwhile, Sam being confronted this season with something from his childhood will be bringing him back in a similar way as Dean was last season around the time of our last Easter Bunny reference, so in a way this can be seen as a challenge to face things from their deep past, going from one episode to the next. 

There is also the matter, for the theme of the imaginary being made real or perhaps just being proved imaginary after all, that of course Sam is in focus at the moment for the visions he is having, and last episode ended with him seeing a vision of the cage. Up until now he has absolutely definitely believed that the visions were from God, as he was led to believe in 11x02 by connecting the first vision to a prayer, and in 11x04 he implied as much, and so Dean is now comfortable snarking at Sam about his visions from God. However the last vision suggests stronger and stronger that this might not be a message from God, but be coming from within the Cage.

Of course, Sam’s dark arc first connected to the Easter Bunny ended up being a very real thing and all about freeing Lucifer for the sake of him being his vessel. If this is a follow on from Dean’s side of the Cain and Abel story and now Sam is having visions from Lucifer that he believes are from God, the presence of the Easter Bunny is weirdly suitable to go back to the early days when this arc was applied to Sam as if he were to be the anti-Christ: something that may not have been true, but we know Sam internalised bad feelings from way beyond his childhood sense of feeling unclean, the demon blood arc being the most important arc for deconstructing Sam that we have ever had - and his childhood came to pay him a visit in 4x21 when he was detoxing, with a vision of himself yelling at him that he had just wanted to grow up to be normal. Now we are being faced with Sam once more having to deal with this arc, and the question is what does he believe now, and what will be revealed to him. The con spoilers suggest that the question will be resolved before the midseason finale, which means this section of episodes focussing on Easter Bunnies and childhood imaginary friends is smack dab in the middle of hugely important mytharc stuff for Sam, and the themes overlap hugely.

So in the end the presence of the Easter Bunny - or not - causes us to ask a lot of questions about what is real, what can exist and what can’t. What haunts our character’s pasts, and what darkness lies within them, past or present. 

The brief mention of the Easter Bunny is one of, nay,  _the_  most important things to happen to Sam this half of the season.


	8. What If Meg Wasn’t Killed Off in 8x17 And When Else They Should Have Done It

##  [AU where…](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/138180565828/au-where)

This post is not meant to be redemptive for the character in question, or as a fix it or even as an approval of basically anything I’m about to type, not least because I’m about to stomp over 2 of my favourite characters of the past three years and encourage one of my few ships I really can’t look directly at to get where I want this AU to go, and that place is something that would, probably, have made me yell at the screen in fury if we’d actually watched this version of the show.

What it  _is_  is that something I’ve often wondered about came to a surprising natural conclusion last episode and I feel deep in my bones it’s an amazing arc that never happened, but it would have been painfully neat to see it done. Anyway after all this oblique muttering about it, it’s about time I shared the full story now it’s come to its resolution…

([x](http://spnfans.tumblr.com/post/62084647543))

I’ve probably wasted way too much of my time on this blog talking about a hypothetical version of the show where Meg wasn’t killed off in 8x17, and about how I feel like there are a few spiritual successors to her storyline that never happened for her.

To summarise a vague gut feeling while ignoring the possibility that the show just has a template female villain out of laziness (and that Meg as the forerunner merely represents a happy medium between the outright destructive nearly motive-less Abaddon and the psychological and emotional approach of Rowena), the show does have a template female villain, of which those three have, in various ways, approached the same story of providing a female villain in opposition to Crowley since season 6.

Meg’s part of the story never paid off: in Caged Heat she shows up desperate and combative towards Crowley (importantly for later: as a kind of Lucifer vs Crowley continuation), but she is unable to gain even enough traction to challenge him.

She disappears for like an entire season with no impact on the storyline until she’s back in 7x17, an episode which also reminds us that season 7 was deliberately a season light on the demons, where Crowley was aware he was not the main antagonist. She is still painted in opposition to him and apparently waging her own (by this point compared to Caged Heat, one demon) war against him, but they both work to help the Winchesters against the bigger problem so their role in that season’s narrative puts them on the same side. At the end of the season she’s taken by Crowley’s goons and not seen again until she’s back to be killed off.

This overlaps with Abaddon’s introduction to the show, although she isn’t pitted against Crowley until 8x23. It felt pretty clear to me in season 9 that her role was basically doing what Meg should have/could have done had they committed to her storyline, which was only ever teased in a handful of small appearances through Gamble era. That is, Meg should have been challenging for the crown the entire time but because the writers never wanted to go there for one reason or another, Meg got dragged along behind the main story, kept around in case she could be useful and for the character continuity, and so that if her opening arose and they wanted to do that storyline then they could.

Abaddon’s challenge was much more direct and violent and focussed. While she’s connected to the Cain arc by 9x11 and the MoL background story from her intro, and these are things specific to her character, I’m going to write her off as a separate character who only did these specific things and stayed in the historical parts, killed in 8x12 and stays dead except for flashbacks - hey, I said I didn’t like doing this part of writing her out.

If we hold the theory the show killed off Meg for Rachel Miner because of her illness and not for any particularly terrible reason like “we were bored of her existing in the background doing nothing” then the overlap in the characters makes sense. Abaddon is brought back from her temporary dismemberment to wreak revenge after Meg has been killed, and the first thing she does is go straight for Crowley, as Meg would have loved to have done had she the chance.

(This reason makes some sense to me because if they were looking for Meg to do something, Abaddon shows up and DOES it within episodes of Meg’s death, suggesting that if killing Meg off was an uninfluenced decision, they literally took five episodes to realise they wanted a female demon villain fighting Crowley for control of Hell, and manufactured a new vendetta between them, while Meg had one she’d been nursing for 3 seasons at that point, having spent those 3 seasons scraping around on the wrong side of the exact same fight. Meg getting free of Crowley in 8x17 and using the tablet thing as a distraction to get away would have meant 5 episodes to rest up (paralleled to Cas over the same time frame even thanks to his story in 8x21/22!) and for her to be the one to bust in the door of the church and come for Crowley in 8x23. Bonus: Sam and Dean don’t have to drop the idiot ball on letting Abaddon loose. Everyone wins.)

For season 9, Abaddon’s role is complex and she’s specifically tied to the Mark of Cain arc, in a way that is hard to reconcile with her as Meg, since of course she is her own character still.

However, assuming the Meg Lives AU works around these plot connections (again, plot things only connected to Abaddon because she was an active secondary villain at the time so giving her a connection made sense to the narrative), we see Meg finally making a challenge, quite possibly to get Crowley back for her imprisonment for the bulk of season 8. Crowley feeling challenged by Abaddon is the motivation for him to convince Dean to get the Mark, but provided Meg is scary enough as her turn around from season 6, 7 and 8, and the 9x02 Meg equivalent episode establishes that inescapably to Dean as she breaks ties with her long standing frenemies truce with the Winchesters, then Crowley could still get some leverage over an emotionally unstable Dean in 9x11.

8x17 establishes if nothing else, she is a very old demon with special knowledge that, as the last standing demon from Azazel’s side of the story, only she has now. If she escalated against Crowley we can play on this. Season 1 establishes her as good at magic and summoning primordial shadow demons (relevant to current events with the Darkness!), and I’d have loved some of that ruthlessness we didn’t see since season 1 to return to the character. Of course, Abaddon in 9x02 uses very similar tactics to Meg in 1x21 when she was setting her trap for John. And there is the tie to Lucifer, that both of them share but Meg’s is first hand, and we have her history on our screens as the longest running character who is not a Winchester, as well as the time of truce developing more complex relationships between her and the Winchesters (and Cas), making her an infinitely more complex and personal threat.

9x21 is an episode we really don’t need, tbh, as, like with some other episodes I won’t name it is mostly structured around killing off a female character and filling in the time before her death with some stalling fluff. It’s not very narratively satisfying at all so let’s assume that in the Meg Lives AU she carries on living, thanks to being a 9 seasons old character who at this point seems to have the same amount of plot immunity as the main characters. Probably in this case, I dunno, if we’re still running the Mark of Cain arc then Dean will have to go on more of a rampage and kill a ton of demons to get to her in order to create the same sense of threat and relevance to Dean’s descent arc but thanks to her being awesome she escapes or isn’t killed.

(Abaddon was supposed to be raising an army we never saw, and it’s always bugged me she never had back up… How about Meg having a warehouse full of demons and Dean kills like *all* of them single handed, and then Crowley steps in to capture Meg while she’s distracted… Or she uses her army as a distraction to get the hell out of there, repeating her 8x17 slippery escape, knowing when there’s a fight she can’t win very well by this point.)

Anyway, season 10 had a gap in it where we did actually see some of this supposed army of Abaddon’s although Crowley was casually manipulating them into attacking demon!Dean and Dean into attacking them. ([One of my recent blah-ings on about this AU is here, about Meg and demon!Dean](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/137345956763/dustydreamsanddirtyscars-7x17-the-born-again) which may or may not fit this as I try and piece it all together)… Anyway somehow or other we get interaction between them all just because it would have been amazing thanks to how long Meg has known the Winchesters and she has seen a lot. However it goes, the start of season 10 introduces the next character in this template…

Now, Rowena came into it from a totally different angle, having a personal connection to Crowley and so on. She only actually made a SOLID play for Hell in her last episode, but through season 10 there were examples of her sitting on Crowley’s throne, and manipulating him and making small power plays which were much more along the lines of getting herself instated as an influential figure at the court - presumably her end goal to have him under her thumb and no one else’s (hence her issue with the Winchesters also having a stake on Crowley under their thumb).

She comes in much more as a successor and flip side to Abaddon (getting to Crowley through love rather than hate) so only traces back to Meg with her as like the character’s spiritual grandmother, but essentially she was still on a “finish what you started” trajectory, considering she’s the one who came closest in the tradition of badass female villains picking a fight with Crowley in particular. She continued to destabilise and threaten Crowley from within and posed a threat to his position at the court, but as the extreme opposite end to Abaddon, she was there to create emotional instability and strife rather than to wreak destruction and threaten politically and physically.

(Here’s part 2 of “I really hate writing these characters out”, but in this case Rowena, whatever different type of story she brought, is still too much in the way of Meg’s role here, so rather than appear at all except maybe a flashback because dammit I like Ruth, we kind of need Meg to have an unfettered access to Crowley now if she follows on, so no Rowena as she has no alternative role or arc that can’t be replaced unlike Abaddon.)

So assuming Meg has managed to survive season 8 and 9 while opposing Crowley, we have her in season 8 off-screen captured by him and season 9 on screen opposing him violently. I suppose 10x07 should end as it did for Rowena, with Meg finally captured but this time unlike in season 8, we see what happens to Meg when Crowley takes her back to his court, at which point, as with Rowena, it goes from outright violence to psychological warfare, again, as I said at the top, Meg being an extremely well-balanced villain, while Rowena was physically weak and spent 90% of her screen time in chains or otherwise imprisoned, and Abaddon was intentionally no finesse as a force of destruction - Meg at many points proved she could do both and so can take over both roles comfortably as long as the writers allow her to.

So, there in Crowley’s court, like Rowena, she finds some excuses to prove her worth to him, bides her time, earns a small degree of freedom, and also, since she did prove she could do magic all the way back in season 1, begins filling a similar role to Rowena in the narrative. Now we begin cashing in some extremely ancient details, specifically to go all the way back to Shadow and Meg’s poorly remembered by the writers witchcraft, as well as 8x17 and her knowledge there of Lucifer-related things. Like Rowena, she is a good character to allow to know or cast magic no one else can (and no one would argue with that backed up textually like “hey remember when you summoned those scary as fuck shadow demons literally no one else has ever dared mess with?”) and for the plot to bend to allow that she might be special or extra skilled because of her history (a season 9 of her finally on the offence would also bolster this). Something like the Book of the Damned could be right up her street, and the Codex to read it from another Lucifer crypt somewhere, collected and stored by the Men of Letters in the Werther box if you want to keep the same episode but with different exposition. (I liked the witches vs MoL stuff but on the other hand literally nothing came of any of the plot threads around Rowena and the Grand Coven so I think it’s pretty safe as of time of writing to assume you can change these things.)

(Before the next paragraph… Throwing in another iteration of the disclaimer from like the first paragraph of this just to point out I’m not a Megstiel shipper at all and I’m only including this because it’s neat…)

So anyway yeah then you get also Meg and Cas interacting for several scenes over 10x21, 22 and 23.

(*breathes a sigh of relief and moves on*)

Okay no that was really lame of me.

So yeah, I don’t know when/if they’d have interacted at any other point, since Abaddon and Cas never met and Rowena didn’t meet Cas until 10x21 and I am adhering as close to actual canon as I possibly can. However, this does actually start leading us into the final stretch of this story.

Not least because Cas casually allowing Meg to stay chained up by Sam to work the spell to cure Dean of the Mark is picking sides (I AM PETTY I’M SORRY) but also because that would be enough for my shipper heart to let them at least flirt a bit more (harmlessly, snarkily, VERY bitterly, as good enemy ships do, which I can appreciate at the very least how they were in Caged Heat because  _damn,_ that kiss :P) without it meaning much as Cas’s side is firmly picked at this point and the whole point was Cas and Sam stubbornly digging in their heels to get the spell done. 

Rowena’s dialogue was weary enough about this but from Meg it would be doubly powerful and interesting for her to analyse Cas some more, as with her “pep talk” to Sam in 8x17, and whatever she and Dean would have talked about with demon!Dean and their other short encounters (10x17 had Dean vs Rowena, right?) Meg never really had so much of a plot talk as a relationship talk with Cas in 8x17, so it would be nice to have her doing the plot talk too, as I suspect it would be a LOT of groundwork for Cas’s season 11 arc. Obviously there’s a lot already in the end of season 10 about Cas’s self worth and use to the Winchesters, although I think Rowena calling him their bitch in 10x23 was a deleted scene? Anyway, mood is set in the real canon, mood x 100 in Meg Lives AU.

Meg then accidentally-deliberately unleashes the Darkness, has one more crack at killing Crowley, and after 3 episodes failing to win him over or convince him he is better off running away with her or whatever, attack-dog-spells Cas and she makes her getaway as Rowena did.

What we have now is Meg firmly wrapped up in the main plot. Meg, last standing Lucifer loyalist. Meg, villain since season 1, making an unexpected revival after so many down seasons and a strop that lasted all of season 2, 3 and 4, and a slump that lasted from 6, 7 and 8… Finally in the position where she seems to have won.

(Okay they track her down and make her un-attack-dog-spell Cas and that’s a bit of a sore point for her but she’s got bigger victories to think about.)

Lucifer starts reaching out to Sam. Because of Meg.

Lucifer, who gets confident he’s convinced Sam to come seek him out… Lucifer who can whisper to Meg, and she hears him reaching out to her for the first time in 6 years. Her  _god_ is finding a way (not a kooky Christmas dream) to reach out to her  _personally_  and finding that whatever she said about causes, her loyalty to him is the only loyalty he’s certain of out there (so he tells her).

Meg allows herself to get caught when Sam is finally desperate enough to try the cage to deal with the Darkness. Meg does all the spells exactly as Lucifer asks, and beams at her god as she summons him to the other cage and sets eyes on him for the first time since the Apocalypse…

(She can deal with him being in Sam again - that’s sort of part of the fun, since she’s been fucking with the Winchesters basically as long as the plan begun al those years ago to get Sam where he needed to be to be the vessel was go…)

Buuut then a whole lot of things happen at once, and Dean and Cas go rushing into the other cage, and Crowley has somehow found a way to make her do what he orders…

Things happen kind of quickly after that, and for a few minutes she’s not sure what actually happened - if she won or lost, if she’s going to have to endure another however long enslaved by Crowley, planning a new escape…

But then Cas is back.

Except it’s not Cas.

It’s Lucifer.

Aaand then that thing where he’s extremely grateful…

([x](http://mrsfitzgerald.tumblr.com/post/137751474873)) But, uh, Meg, perhaps you should have been paying attention back in that same episode where Lucifer once gently cupped your face in his hands (But it’s Lucifer in Cas’s body doing this to Meg this time!) because at the end of the day…

> LUCIFER  
> What? They’re just demons.


	9. The Shoulder Thing That Lucifer Does

> **Anonymous**  asked:
> 
> sorry to bother you, but maybe you can explain, why are people saying Dean didn't notice something was off about Cas? he clearly said "something seems off about Cas" in the episode, didn't people hear that? also, I think Lucifer did a REALLY good job of being Cas, with the soulful staring. the emotional conversation and everything so I think it's pretty impressive that Dean noticed something was off at all. also didn't we already know from the promo they don't notice until episode 14?

* * *

Yeah… To be honest, the “wrong shoulder, dude” analysis from before the episode was a speculation that held up in the scene, to my eyes? And as you say Dean DID know something was off by the end so I don’t need to convince you :P I also thought it was pretty obvious that Dean ended up suspicious.

Dean could not have been OVERLY suspicious of Casifer once they started interacting. I think tbh the way Dean mistook “Cas” for an intruder and came rushing down the hall gun in hand is a good sort of indicator that he had a  _correct_  gut feeling that something was weird, and he challenges “Cas” as soon as he finds him - “we don’t hear from you for days, you show up and start wrecking the joint?”

Casifer IS acting out of character for Cas, even when it comes to handling their property. Cas has spent some time now hanging out with them and touching their stuff, digging through their personal supplies without asking, even like in 8x08 where it was invasive snooping into Dean’s bag just out of curiosity about his toiletries. But he’s respectful about it and he’s not like a pet that still needs housebreaking that will just leave a mess and throw their stuff everywhere. Meanwhile Lucifer has knocked over two filing cabinets for some reason which can not be about making it easier to find things. The room is subtly messed up with drawers open everywhere and papers and index cards spilled, which I think is probably symbolic in of itself about the scene and how Dean gets unintentionally emotionally gutted by Lucifer - which he can only realise later. 

  


I think the important thing is that Dean is really really willing to accept an apology and an explanation because he doesn’t WANT it not to be Cas, so he gives Casifer the benefit of the doubt at the start of the conversation instead of challenging him right away, which I think is what some people would have wanted - not for Dean to even go into the conversation at all.

(Casifer seems to be taller than Dean, rewatching this :P)

Dean also takes a long time to meet Casifer’s eye as well: the subject is Amara basically the whole time they’re in the room together. and Dean is having a hard time talking about that, and so he’s clearly consumed with some self-centred thoughts about that as well, working up the nerve to talk to Cas about it - he’s been harping on it since the very first episode - his weird stare at the end of 11x01 and drinking at the end of 11x06 are both moments he really self reflected on what was going on about him and Amara and didn’t share, so this is half a season of build up for Dean to finally trust someone enough to talk, so he is clearly in turmoil if we take into account how hard this is for him to speak.

This gifset: <http://ksenianovak.tumblr.com/post/138198364555> simplifies the reactions but gets the message across in Dean’s body language in a way I feel is honest to the scene, for people who can’t rewatch.

Through the “Attraction!?” bit of the conversation the emphasis on reactions is on Casifer since Misha is being scene stealing, but Dean continues to not make much eye contact, distracting himself to look for the knife he came for:

This is right after Dean confesses to the “attraction”. Casifer moves closer and Dean instinctively looks away, after two shots of him sneaking a glance at Cas in short succession to check his reaction isn’t too whatever Dean doesn’t want to see, so for HIS side of things,  _he is not paying attention to Cas_ , at least not for more than proximity and what he  _expects_  to hear, because he’s not devouring Cas’s reaction with his eyes, seeking out the full response. Dean  _expects_  comfort and understanding, but he also finds it hard to look at Cas. His grumbly “I know” about Cas’s “Dean,” sounds to me like he read it as concern and he’s saying “I know” as in “I have been angsting about this all season, trust me, I understand how bad it is.” He glances at Casifer a couple more ties, but he continues talking away down to the left as he admits about not being sure he can stop or resist it.

So he’s STILL not focussing on Cas’s reaction to all this - not more than understanding that Cas is currently hearing him out, and Dean’s got his expectations about what a heartfelt conversation with Cas entails to keep him going even if Lucifer’s reactions and mannerisms are not 100% Cas - Dean hasn’t even been looking at him to catch all the weird quirks of how he’s not moving like Cas any more.

And then FINALLY Cas puts that hand on Dean’s shoulder and Dean finally looks up and makes proper eye contact with him as Casifer says “It scares me too.” 

It’s his reactions after that which are really interesting:

His eyes flick up on “scares me too”

but if we consider that 11x10 gave us Cas pawing all over Dean in another “similar” moment of concern and Dean was totally fine with physical interaction there, the non-Cas way of holding Dean’s shoulder with the very deliberate touch as if “This is me putting a hand on your shoulder because that is a thing that comforts humans” is distinguishable from “Hi I’m Cas I would literally help you pick your nose if you asked because I have no sense of personal boundaries but I do care about you” - it’s not so clear that Dean suspects Casifer of being “off” just from this, but he seems wary in a way that’s connected to the way Casifer touches him and we know he does NOT mind physical interaction with Cas. So.

Anyway, his face is fascinating after that:

(I made these gifs slower than normal to peer at his face better :P) You can see his eyes narrow on “we will find out what this is, I promise” which means now he’s actually looking at Cas, he’s beginning to not quite trust the way he’s acting, probably because the shoulder grip startled him, but maybe because Cas isn’t quiiite talking like Cas in this amazing show of Misha acting Lucifer acting Cas.

And then finally, the infamous “this could be a good thing” line, which we got in isolation in the promos but is actually a run on from talking about drawing Amara out, an abjectly bad idea when Dean has been talking about how scared he is of her, and Lucifer of course is only saying Amara scares him too to worm his way in emotionally:

Dean looks away, and then his eyes flick back up to Casifer, and after that he looks away because his phone rings, but only AFTER he looks suspiciously at Cas. I feel like he might have questioned Casifer’s “this could be a good thing” and what he seems to be saying about drawing Amara out, but he is interrupted, so all we have to go on is a fraction of a look of suspicion and a flicker of narrowed eyes.

And then Casifer tells Dean he’ll be there when they face Amara next time and Dean’s like “thanks Cas” (the dialogue in this gif) and walks off without another word between them.

He’s still not meeting Cas’s eye and he looks quite concerned - if he already felt weird about Cas’s suggestion earlier about drawing Amara out using their connection, Casifer’s promise here is not particularly reassuring to him. I almost see the “thanks” as a sort of placating thing but is really a “… but no thanks” to that idea. Whatever it is, he does seem uncomfortable with Casifer here where he wasn’t until the wrong shoulder thing earlier. Maybe couldn’t meet his eye then, but it was for his own issues… And now it’s for Lucifer related issues :P

Anyway, like you say, they may not know about Casifer until 11x14 or so, but it’s reasonable for Dean to be suspicious and he did say he thought Cas was off. I don’t think even if he fully suspected after the junk room conversation that in the library conversation he would have said anything. And we know he’s spent half a season repressing about Amara so even if he did have a suspicion it WAS Lucifer and he HAD put it together as the only thing that could be “off” with Cas, then he’s not saying what he’s thinking as if to not make it real yet. So Dean not immediately figuring it so far as we can tell may just be Dean repressing this fear, just the same as he refused to talk for several episodes earlier in the season about Sam plausibly going to the cage in the first place.

* * *

> **Anonymous**  asked:

> Rewatching SPN and I just realized Lucifer!Sam trying to put his hand on Dean's shoulder in The End is the same as Lucifer!Cas doing the same thing but succeeding.

* * *

Oh my god, does he?

wow, fuck that guy :P

There’s a really great meta about Hallucifer using his physical presence as a power play in season 7:

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/93622706858/lobaeclipse-pondstiel-santy-anno>

and I guess this is more of the same - he’s trying to be all friendly to Dean here, but everyone in the room knows how powerful he is and how unfriendly he REALLY is, so his attempts to seem all buddy buddy with Dean aren’t working at all - Dean’s got pretty much nothing to lose at this point - Lucifer’s just pointed out he’d have killed Dean if he wanted to by gesturing at dead endverse!Dean to him, so our Dean sort of has the luxury to react, and refute this gesture. Considering Lucifer is going for an emotional manipulation, intended to carry back to 2005, he actually does have to allow Dean to do this, and the weird time bubble lets them talk on an almost level platform - Dean is allowed to say “you won’t touch me” here and for Lucifer to be like, dang, better manipulate him a different way.

So it’s not just that he knows it’s Lucifer, but that he has the luxury to resist?

In 11x11 obviously he doesn’t know it’s not Cas, and I’m pretty sure some of the analysis at the time also mentioned how it was a power play, but of course also using the DeanCas dynamic to get close and abuse Dean’s trust in Cas to be allowed to do that in the first place, and then his gesture is all fake reassuring and secretly condescending just because you KNOW he doesn’t care. Plenty was written at the time of this episode how the banshee going for Dean because he was “vulnerable” was because he’d been used like this by Lucifer and opened up to him without knowing it, and that put Lucifer at a power advantage over him more than just being in Cas and Dean not knowing it - but because he’d used the privileges of that relationship to get close and betrayed the trust.

And of course Lucifer’s using it with the same secret sentiment as in 5x04 as his own personal amusement in that moment:

> LUCIFER  
> I’m sorry. It must be painful, speaking to me in this—shape. 

All fake sympathy knowing exactly how Dean would feel if he knew.

All the actors who have played Lucifer gave him the most physical presence ever, and stuff like either of these shoulder touches are using that a lot - just the fact Lucifer is grabby and presumptive. 

Actually in 11x11 Lucifer has the opposite problem of 5x04 to the same result - because Dean doesn’t KNOW it’s him he can’t intimidate him in the same way and if he’s pretending to be Cas he can’t kill Dean because now he’s manipulating him in secret. The same move there even though Cas has a long habit of touching Dean’s shoulder, comes off clearly more grabby than Dean is used to, and unsettles him in that moment enough to make Dean suspicious about something being off with Cas so much he actually says something about it later, because the body language was too confident. Almost like Dean would have shied away from the touch but he didn’t know that he should, but just something instinctive about the way Lucifer came at him there, a sense memory of Endverse or something.

I guess it wasn’t enough to let Dean know for sure he was being manipulated but extra parallels back to Lucifer’s earlier stuff is really interesting. Nice spot. >.>


	10. Lucifer Rolled Up Cas’s Sleeves Because He Is A Working Class Archangel (what am i even saying)

**Anonymous**  asked:

Heey, I rewatched 11x06, and I think Cas is actually more underdressed than Lucifer when he's relaxing? Cas doesn't wear a tie and he has his shirt untucked while he's on Netflix binge. Cas changes his clothes to compartmentalize. I think Cas might shrug on his coat even while he's doing research? Dean might have felt something off about Cas because Casifer was dressed in an awkward mid way between Cas's 'business mode' and 'relaxing mode' what with his tie on and his shirt still tucked.

I can’t even remember how I intended to answer this when I first got this ask (I am SO SORRY I’ve been so tired :S) but I scrolled past some gifs of Cas in 11x02 and since this has been sitting in the back of my mind waiting to be answered for a day, I immediately thought of your phrasing describing his clothes. Because of course that’s how Cas was dressed after the angels started torturing him. 

[Most of the meta about Cas’s clothes](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/tagged/trenchcoat-meta) boil down to describing his clothes as paralleling how human he is, or how vulnerable. I think (without actually reading that tag to check :P) the discussion about his clothes in 11x02 was more to show what side he was on and how he wasn’t so much of an angel any more (since that was what the angels’ beef with him really came down to), but he was also stripped down to make him vulnerable. I seem to remember a comment about him putting on the trenchcoat again as armour. And remembering how you phrased this about his clothes in 11x06 after seeing gifs of him in 11x02 makes me think a lot about how his TV watching state was paralleled with that and showing how he is just as vulnerable? It was less physical peril and more emotional peril, but as it turned out Cas’s emotional peril was much more something to watch out for this time around seeing as it led to where we are now…

But of course the trench coat represents the core identity of Cas as well, so Lucifer choosing not to wear it is showing at least in the scene with Dean that there is a clue that it’s not Cas (if only he paid attention to the meta :P) and like you say, it’s enough not like any way Cas would dress for it to seem strange. 

(Actually the whole sleeves rolled up but still wearing a tie and walking about holding paper folders thing made me feel a lot like he was channelling white collar office worker vibes - shedding the outer layers that make Cas so frumpy most of the time and leaving the shirt tucked in channels those vibes. I was saying somewhere or other how Lucifer likes the hands on approach, and it’s making me parallel apocalypse Lucifer as a blue collar worker, digging holes to get what he needs with his sleeves rolled up for manual labour:

([x](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.homeofthenutty.com%2Fsupernatural%2Fscreencaps%2Fdisplayimage.php%3Falbum%3D92%26pid%3D62877%23top_display_media&t=OGIxYTA1ZTlkMjY5ODY0MWMzNDM4NGMzZTRmNGRiOTMyZmQzOTFhNixPM3JEWWxPTA%3D%3D&b=t%3AEoTmUHpiEEiE91JGAXVv3Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Felizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F138413634723%2Fheey-i-rewatched-11x06-and-i-think-cas-is&m=1)) with this new different class approach where now he’s still getting stuff done himself, but he’s looking like a guy who stayed late at the office to file some important paperwork that’s due:

Which is completely separate from Cas clothes analysis, but the fact that I’m getting twisted season 5 Lucifer vibes from Misha’s acting is blowing my mind about how good he is at this, and in this case the clothes are a part of that, in the way that they fit with this previous characterisation of Lucifer, and the rolled up sleeves are just a part of that characterisation. :P)

But yeah, somehow the overall picture is much neater than Cas: we’ve seen Cas over the years descend right into laying mostly naked in bed for comfort, and 11x06 was much more along those lines of just stripping away layers and untucking and ditching the tie for slobby comfort, while Lucifer has also stripped down for comfort, but done so in a totally different way of utilising the same costume and making it look neater. He’s wearing the trenchcoat in the previews for the next episode he’s in (11x14?) so he clearly understands the point of playing the role and dressing as Cas, but we caught him here not expecting to be interrupted, so this is how he’s dressing when he doesn’t have to look like Cas, and as you said, Casifer dressed like this actually is “off” from any way we see Cas dressed…

I really love the costuming on this show. :D


	11. 11x16 is a nice shaped episode.

I’m still not even past admiring the  _shape_ of 11x16. I almost feel like it was a meta episode in its own way just for hand-holding us through a 101 on narrative parallels?

Almost the entire episode ran the exact same story, twice, scene by scene with us seeing it once from Sam and Dean and once from Rufus and Bobby, with obvious connections between the characters that held true throughout: Sam and Rufus were established as one parallel, right from it being the 2 of them responsible for getting the other onto the case, right through to the end: if Rufus did something in a flashback it would be Sam we caught up to doing it on the other side, and if Dean did something that would blend back into Bobby doing it. This back and forth exists all episode but establishes pretty quickly with transition shots between the two timelines how specific and matched up these stories are, so that you are thinking of them as one entity at the same time as 2 separate threads.

These two sides played off each other with only a small amount of interaction from the past into the present, to not make it too easy on the present by handing them a finished case, but I was really impressed that both had a solution, only Sam and Dean’s one resolved things much better than the previous. It was Bobby’s original solution that inspired Sam in the present with their better resources to find a spell that would really work, but it couldn’t have happened without seeing what Bobby did before…

And then the spell that they do requires input on both sides, literally, and has an effect on both sides, metaphorically, causing a good result that saved EVERYONE trapped in the house, past and present, to be freed. The two arcs worked together telling two different, but identical stories, even resolved with similar drama of Rufus/Sam painting and Bobby/Dean going into the nest. The parallels diverge there because Bobby is doing the first run of the story, and he has no confidence - he’s a victim Rufus isn’t even sure his spell will do anything to save, and so he expresses fear. Meanwhile Dean has confidence that the spell will work and has willingly been abducted into the nest to do his part of the spell, building off the story from a handful of years ago.

The real pay off for this as a metaphor is at the end when Rufus is trying to  _interpret_  what their side of the story meant, without all the information. He has no idea how the thing he painted could have saved everyone (and while not looking a gift horse in the mouth) he can’t explain it so much that he even lies to Bobby about what type of monster it was briefly while trying to puzzle it out. 

Meanwhile later in the timeline, we know that Sam and Dean’s efforts, through the space and time effect of the house, enacted a much more powerful spell - built on Rufus and Bobby’s original hunt - which had the effect that is the pay off for the story that Rufus - the metaphor for the viewer in this case - couldn’t put together before the whole story had happened, even if effects of it were being felt a long time previously. 

This also shows how the parallels can subvert each other while telling the same story, as the work of one time line affected the other - in both directions. But Sam and Dean were not doomed to repeat what Rufus and Bobby had done, and in fact the resolution of the episode came down to the different changes that they could make. So while seeing one storyline in action that is an obvious parallel might make you think events will play out that way, it’s cautioning that the mirrors can often be warnings or at least not how the final event will play out. 

Also, Sam and Dean halfway through the story meet and interview one of the victims that THEY saved, but they have no idea that they did it or that she was free because of their efforts. The endgame of the episode is being taunted to them in events that have already been written down and maybe even SHOWN to them, but without their own context from later, they don’t even realise that the story will take them there.

I mean this is nothing new that in the meta community we talk about parallels and foreshadowing all the time without even thinking about it, but I found it really interesting how cleverly this was structured to show the way they are at work in a story. If not to make more people think about them, then perhaps a warning to pay attention to the wider story parallels at work here…

… but also maybe not to take them too much to heart yet?

(I’m also mainly clinging here to “oldest rule in hunting, Bobby. You can’t save everyone” as that was mentioned 3 times, and then Sam and Dean subverted it and did about as good as they could with a Save Everyone ending, even the victims on Rufus and Bobby’s case FOR them which says a whole lot about the present subverting the past)

* * *

 

 [charlie-minion](http://charlie-minion.tumblr.com/post/141612311467)

I just read this and internally laughed because I just posted something titled: [SPN 11x16: You can’t save everyone!](http://charlie-minion.tumblr.com/post/141611955942/spn-11x16-you-cant-save-everyone) 

I’m glad others have been drawn to that as much as I have. :)

 [mittensmorgul](http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/141637185290)

Same here.

> DR. CARTWRIGHT: So, is there a quota? How many people do you have to save?
> 
> DEAN: All of them.
> 
> DR. CARTWRIGHT: All of them? You think you have to save everyone?
> 
> DEAN: Yep. Whole wide world of sports. (spn 5.11)

But then:

> CASTIEL:  You can’t save everyone, my friend… though, you try. (8.07, just break my damn heart already)

And:

> SAM: Saving people means all of the people, Dean. Not just that baby. Not just each other. I unleashed a force on this world that could destroy it … to save you.
> 
> DEAN: And I told you not to.
> 
> SAM: And I’d do it again. In a second, I would do it again. And that is what I’m talking about. This isn’t on you. It is on us. We have to change.(spn 11.01)

And now 11.16? Where Rufus said they couldn’t save everyone. But at least in the context of this episode, everyone was saved. Bobby and Rufus may not have understood how it happened, not really, but they still played a vital role in it happening at all. Without their  _almost_  solution in the past, Sam and Dean wouldn’t have had a baseline to work from, to find a better solution.

I think I’ve been thinking about this all too much. :D


	12. I Watched The Man I Love Die

> [1940sdeancas](http://1940sdeancas.tumblr.com/post/142422381526)

> hey so remember 11x11 when the text was referring to Dean supposedly pining over Amara but the subtext was Dean pining over Cas
> 
> and now after several episodes of Dean being so concerned about getting Cas back we literally just had a situation where, despite Amara being right there, Dean was able to push aside Amara’s hold on him long enough to call out to Cas with so much hope in his voice even though he had no idea if he could hear him
> 
> I mean honestly after all that how could there be any question who Dean is really pining for

* * *

 

 [elizabethrobertajones](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/142453620693/1940sdeancas-hey-so-remember-11x11-when-the)

The gifset of “watched the man I love die” went across my dash in the middle of all the post-episode chaos last night and I had similar thoughts, actually more along the line of these about 11x11 than that episode… 

I think there was a great deal of uncertainty all through the season about what they were trying to do, and if they were even still telling Destiel subtextually, making it hard to even trust Robbie’s motivations, never mind what the show in general was trying to tell us or to do with this subplot - some of us were hoping it would make a more explicit Amara/Dean/Cas love triangle in the sense of once they put in the creepy subtext with Amara, trying to make the best of it was hoping they’d have Dean do pretty much exactly this and renounce that ~connection~ not just as he did in 11x13 but FOR Cas as he did here…

While I’m staying safely on the side of saying this will probably all still be subtextual same as usual for the rest of the season, even so far as toeing the line with a power of love recovery of Cas or defeat of Amara (as I suspect at least one of those may happen/both at once if we’re ridiculously lucky) I think (especially from watching season 6 & 7 recently, which felt similar) this is going to be a season to rewatch with hindsight? Like, say, as a counter example season 8 or 9 were fairly open about Dean n Cas’s feelings and just kept them star-crossed (even season 10 opens with non-stop Destiel from Cas’s side through eps 1-3, but like, nothing can top the Cas left behind in Purgatory opening, and a season with 9x06 in its opening quarter is up to something shady :P). 

But to compare similar Destiel scenario seasons to 11, season 6 swings around after 6x20 and opens Cas’s actions earlier in the season to more obvious interpretation he’s in love with Dean as the episode pretty much straight up tells us that, and season 7, once Cas returns and we have the whole trenchcoat moment, makes it much easier and perhaps even encourages the reading that Dean’s depression over the season was specifically tuned to missing/mourning Cas, while before it was certain he’d come back it was more about what Cas did, and less about the specific relationship dynamic? If you know what I mean?

like, in this case, season 11 swings around on 11x18 in the same way 7x17 or 6x20 fucked up their respective season, and makes it clear in a way that was never so obvious that Amara/Dean/Cas is the love triangle of the season AND which side Dean has firmly picked, all in one go, so revisiting 11x11 there is no vagueness about IF the pining line is ambiguously referring to Amara or Cas: it IS referring to Amara or Cas, with both intentions in there… And then 11x13 goes on to prove Amara is the romantic false lead, narratively, and then finally getting back to 11x18 it proves Cas is the true motivation? Each time bringing that pining line more and more into focus…

All season everyone’s been so anxious about about this story and if Dean even cares - after 11x14 my inbox/dash were awash with people doubting if Dean loved Cas or if this was enough or if it was all being pushed down and the arc neglected, while we built up and waited for an episode like 11x18… Even just taking that anxiety away knowing that there’s an episode coming where Dean unequivocally puts Cas before everything and flips out like he did makes the whole run of like 4 episodes before that appear in a different light as the build up and gives us the certainty of what Dean’s feeling. 

At this point with their other goals unachievable and the extreme likelihood we’re literally waiting for a deus ex machina on the main plot since the story is actively courting God’s return, Dean and Sam’s main stated mission as of the end of 11x18 is *just* saving Cas, no shopping list like they’ve been reeling off as a plot summary each episode of *all* their problems…

I dunno, I feel like the positivity for this episode is not necessarily just because of the huge helping of Destiel but like you say it changes the way we read the whole season? There was so much anxiety and negativity from the start because of season 10′s ending (that I was not immune to either) AND Amara was presented in such a sketchy way re: her interest in Dean as a teenager, that it was hard to have any hope for the season and I’ve spent most of the season muttering to myself for them not to fuck it up with every new episode, even as they produce enjoyable episode after enjoyable episode the dread about the main plot has stuck around? This feels like the first time they’ve dealt up concrete hope that the season might remotely go our way, and it’s changing how we look at the entire story so far?


	13. The Chitters vs Into The Mystic - How Cesar was for Dean what Eileen was for Sam

On my mind after watching 11x19 is that it and 11x11 each have such specific relevance to one particular Winchester per episode when it comes to the little mini arc set up in 11x04 where Sam asks Dean about something with someone in the life.

11x11 and Eileen seem specifically about Sam, romantically, and Dean is even paired off quite blatantly with Mildred, the most excellent “romantic false lead” ever to show us the two of them being paired off and Mildred even intervening to let them have alone time after vicariously shipping them together herself as a way of ascertaining Eileen’s interest in Sam (I mean… I assume so, if you guess she’s super canny and kindly about being very manipulative, and she literally drags Dean away from Sam and Eileen at one point :P). Eileen is also very compatible thematically to Sam as someone he can reflect on as well as attach to… She has similar mental landscape to Sam, with the cold open showing something happening to her while she was in her crib, a life-long thing to hunt, getting revenge but not going to a law career, etc.

She was very clearly someone fitting the description of what Sam had been wondering about in 11x04. She’s very clearly a mirror and parallel to him, as well as someone who represents what he actively wants, because I really don’t think you can pair the 11x04 conversation and Sam stashing a retirement home leaflet as being JUST Sam planning for his future. That’s a ridiculous romantic keepsake that reminds him of that excellent day, because Eileen did not have the presence of mind to give him a freakin’ lock of her hair or something more appropriate than stealing a pamphlet on the way out the door of the retirement home…

In 11x19 Jesse and Cesar are a bit more of an abstract example for Dean, but show him basically what he could take away from all this - he dismisses Sam in 11x04 asking him about it all, but in 11x19 he’s so surprised he derails their discussion of the monster to croak out his question about what’s it like settling down with a hunter, as if seeing for the first time. (I mean, seriously, I haven’t re-watched in ages, I’m amazed at how creaky and off-guard he sounds as he asks after seeing it in gifsets mostly since then…) Then someone else has to interrupt back onto the monster exposition dump they’d been in the middle of until Dean (of course) managed to blurt out enough words to make Cesar be like, come on babe, this is going to be so awkward, I’m just going to tell him, and Jesse scowled like, fine but don’t blame me if they hate us, and Cesar was like, nah this guy is cool, just… going to randomly reveal we’re married to him like, I toootally don’t feel a comfortable level of kinship with this dude or something hahaha that would be ridiculous (sorry, that pretend inner monologue turned into me being snarky >.> There’s no characterisation consistency in my rambling :D)

So Dean and Sam are split up again and Jesse represents some pretty different emotional stuff to Sam, dealing with the brother stuff and all that (just like Mildred dealt more with the retirement and old age theme to Dean of making him long for a sunset without necessarily bringing in romantic connections unless you’re me and have the Gas n Sip logo tattooed on your eyelids), while Cesar and Dean mostly just hunt and bond a bit. They very specifically have a conversation about revenge on the drive to it, which reflects Eileen’s parting comments about the hunt feeling no different despite it being her revenge resolution hunt (meaning she continues hunting, as Sam does, though with a tease that they could come together and bear the life together… I’m just… not thinking outside of season 11 right now okay). Both Jesse and Eileen get on-screen origin stories and their revenge on the monster that caused them, but Jesse and Cesar get to have a happy ending and drive off into the sunset because they have each other and a firm understanding of when they can stop hunting and knowing when it’s all over. Sam stashed the leaflet about the retirement home in his box of special things, but as 11x19 ends as well with them still having looming work to do, they just can’t think about packing it in quite yet, though the point is made in both, that this is the discussion on the table - hunter endgames.

Dean’s understanding of Cesar’s relationship with Jesse and the understandings they have and Cesar’s read of it founded ON the revenge thing and “peace when you are done”, to borrow from the road so far song, is what informs his decision not to ask them to help with fighting Amara at the end. His interpersonal arc with Cesar was much more openly muted than Sam and Jesse having the emotional encounter with the old sheriff and the very obvious links with Jesse yelling about his brother, which makes parallels that on this show can always be read from space when someone says “brother”. It leads Dean to the important decision of understanding what to do about letting them go raise their horses in peace. Dean is personally connected to the side of the story about their marriage, and split off with Cesar who is just married into the revenge mission whose only connection to care about it is because of what it’s doing to his husband, and not for his own sake.

Essentially, the fact they were married hunters is presented to surprise Dean (and he’s seen married, heterosexual, hunters before so that question may have been answered honestly by Cesar just to the pressures of marriage in a dangerous crappy job, but seems to mean with Dean asking, wait, you can MARRY another MALE hunter what the heck i never even - ) and he’s the one who asks (and since Jesse is surly and untrusting as a result of the discrimination of this town (and in both episodes understanding is presented as belief in monsters - Mildred is good because she already saw a ghost and is willing to believe… Jesse is living a metaphor where the town’s intolerance is both of him being gay AND the fact he kept saying he saw a monster - the intolerance metaphor is soubled down on by the sheriff and his reaction to discovering his daughter was taken, and I hope the point of the metaphor was that the chitter monsters were how intolerant people SAW gay people *from their perspective* of it being so bad you’d disown and never talk of it etc). Cesar, the one linked to Dean more - I mean he even saved him for starters and it was Dean sent off into the woods to make first contact with him by a fortuitous phonecall, though if there was nothing going on on a higher narrative level Sam could have just have easily done that). Dean’s the one split off on the side of the story about their marriage with Cesar again, and he’s the one who makes the judgement call about them being allowed to go settle down and have some peace and safety together.

Cesar in basically every way does as a side-character function for Dean what Eileen does for Sam. Except the obvious second level remove here with him already being married, and the fact that Dean is also un-pairable in 11x11, hence Mildred, who by being romantically interesting to Dean (look, they watch a sunset together, you don’t have to ship them or think they actually would ever - but that’s a romantically coded moment and he has a big heart so it’s still a Thing even if it’s a go-nowhere thing. It’s a thing Sam could later tease him about and Dean would blush and smile fondly about Mildred’s attention even if he had no intention of hooking up with her…) kinda has the opposite but identical effect of a sexy hookup where there’s no romance, just a fling. Mildred was absolutely Dean’s meaningless girl of the week if you wanna be technical about her role there :P Anyway in both cases Dean just sees and experiences, and in his specifically tailored episode on this theme, he only sees an example of what he could have, not as Sam sees, someone who could very easily be that exact endgame.

Because, as Mildred says, Dean was very obviously pining for someone else.

And Dean’s personal relationship and retirement introspection episode comes wedged in after 11x18, where he’s just lost Cas to Amara in a sort of ridiculously painful doubling down on how *much* he’s lost Cas, even in spite of Amara’s presence… And soon we will get the direct testing of these rival bonds… But that’s a whole other web of meta on the main arc relationship parallels which I spent all of season 11 and most of the hiatus after mired in, so I think we’re good here :P


	14. The Longing Retcon In 11x21

> **Anonymous**  asked:
> 
> Does this mean that Dean isn't 'longing' for Amara, or can Amara only pick up on conscious prayers and not longing? Was Dean praying to Cas during 11x21?!

* * *

Re this:

> mostly for filing purposes in my longing retcon tag after watching 11x01 -> 11x11 today
> 
> 11x06 establishes that Sidney, the soulless babysitter/Amara worshipper, is sending out a prayer beacon to alert Amara to her presence and Amara can follow that, proving that Amara works by the same rules as angels, established definitively in 10x10 when Cas said he could follow prayers and/or vague undefined “longing” to the source.
> 
> (11x10: established Amara can eat angels/souls/whatever and learn memories from them)
> 
> (11x11: Dean is informed he’s pining and to “follow his heart”)
> 
> 11x21, Amara puts her hand over Cas’s heart and sends a message to Dean, who is sitting at the war room table in the Bunker
> 
> 11x22, Amara finds and consumes Donatello in order to learn the location of the Bunker (where he spent most of his time in the war room at the table) and teleports herself on top of the table

*squints suspiciously at 2am!Lizzy from the perspective of brainless morning-zombie!Lizzy who has not finished her coffee and hates 2am!Lizzy for not going to bed after watching 11x08 like she originally planned*

I think the most important thing here is that the longing retcon is not about prayer or love or whatever…

it’s a hasty excuse to use those things as GPS.

I guess the main conceit of the longing retcon when we were jokingly applying it to Dean last year was that he was just longing all the time, and that’s how Cas managed to keep finding him, or we were making tragic headcanons about how Cas could feel Dean’s longing even at all the worst times… 

So this year anyone [who got too overly invested in the retcon](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/tagged/pining-not-praying/chrono) (says someone who totally didn’t kick off the No Homo Intern thing because of it) has had a bit of a wild ride, when we go from 11x06 using the same mechanics (aka wordless prayer as a beacon so we know she CAN pick up on longing directed her way just as Cas can) “pining for somebody else” (I had been using “pining” as my “longing” tag for just over a year at that point for the sake of alliteration only, so I got some shrieking in my inbox for that :P After that it went from a cracky tragic headcanon tag to a serious meta tag about Dean and Amara’s connection vs the Destiel pining), but there was this awful feeling it was all gonna be Amara and the potential for Destiel pining was going to stay as vague as it had been when we only knew about this mechanic because of Cas talking to  _Claire_  about it. 

And then 11x13 went ahead and laid out some more of the mechanics of how Dean is affected by Amara: short range only, physical presence required (she finds him when they’re in the same town and started off close-by in 11x06 where he didn’t seem to notice her, and 11x09 where she was probably within 100m of him the whole time, much older and more powerful, and he did sense her), otherwise he’s completely and utterly freaked out by her and their connection (11x11 starts this off with him telling Casifer about it but with Lucifer being very unhelpful with his “attraction?? LOL LOL LOL” moment so we don’t get the full exploration of it because Dean is busy making sad confused eyes at “Cas” - also re-watching THAT scene made the one around the Bunker table where Lucifer is like “your GIRLFRIEND remember? LOOOLLLL” more obvious to me (I have no idea why I hear Lucifer typing “LOL” when he talks but I do)) 

Anyway we can take him at face value that within a couple of episodes of being told he’s pining he explains how he’s not pining for Amara, and then after that he gets the horrible news about Casifer. So he spends the next… 8? episodes blatantly worrying about Cas on screen as his motivation and implied preferred choice of pastime between episodes, which I’d file as “pining” just on principle even if we didn’t have these odd mechanics about prayers going on.

I was just expecting these mechanics to stay largely out of the way, but then our VALIANT ATTEMPTS to keep this all cracky headcanon got blown out of the water:

<http://justanotheridijiton.tumblr.com/post/144373508029/is-lucifer-getting-deans-prayer-along-with-cas-i>

(Okay there’s probably a more serious post about 11x21 and Amara reaching out to Dean seemingly via Cas while he’s still desperately searching for Amara for the sake of finding Cas as per everything we knew about his motivations from the previous 7 or 8 episodes of visible on-screen pining)

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/144664418288/for-those-destiel-fans-that-felt-disheartened-by>

And Donatello ended up in 11x21 and 11x22 only being used as fancy GPS as his main purpose in the narrative.

I mean my tags on the original post that there’s plausible deniability is because this comes from directing choices (11x21′s use of Amara ~following the pining~ from Cas’s heart - in the “main text” Dean grumpily asks where Amara is moments before she appears to him but we can assume at this point Dean was at 100% pining capacity non-stop between 11x14 > 11x22), plot holes (if you don’t account for pining, she should already have known exactly where the Bunker was, so why was it different between contacting Dean (via Cas) and trying to physically get there? This show is not exactly watertight though - they literally switched the birth order of the archangels for plot convenience), throw away comments dating back to 10x10 that no one might remember (unless they DO) or whatever. 

But between previously established lore on Amara (and it seems from watching the first 11 episodes in one day, that the writers all had a very set book on who Amara was: her dialogue about what’s happened to her and what she wants to do rings true across the season for example), jokes about Dean pining taken way too seriously, and the surprise that after all that, at no point in the season has Dean ever pined hard enough for Amara (11x11′s final scene for example was suggested as being about Amara and would have been a ton of confused angry pining for her beamed directly from his bedroom in that case) that she could locate the Bunker, and she had to resort to tracking down someone else who had been there to find out where it was (as God’s last known location rather than where Dean was, as her motivation) and get in…

The author is dead (or dying anyway :P), long live the Longing Retcon 


	15. You Love Chick Flicks

**1x01 vs 11x23**

****

****

I know how easy it is to parallel the season 11 exchange with a certain other one in the Pilot because, well… Dialogue repeat.

When it comes to Performing!Dean though, I think this is FASCINATING to see when Dean says something, Sam sees through it, and calls him out. He doesn’t on the chick flicks thing in 1x01 because it’s not ~important~ in the way where Sam eye rolls his way through a lot of the more obvious surface macho nonsense Dean puts on, because some things are obvious even to Sam that Dean’s being a bit ridiculous.

But I’m not thinking about that, I’m thinking about Sam seeing through to the deep dark heart of things, and the way this first exchange, the IMPORTANT exchange, in 1x01, about Dean’s loneliness and need to gather up his family close, was written all over his face, and Sam knew exactly what Dean was doing, becaus he knew how competent Dean was as a hunter, and that the only reason he’d come to get Sam is if he wanted the support. He knew Dean was reaching out to him.

The first “no chick flick moments” line is said when Sam tries to apologise for an earlier fight, and Dean blows him off, probably as a way to absolve Sam of having to apologise, and Sam can blow THAT performing off as Dean being uncomfortable talking about feelings but also that he doesn’t feel he has to talk about this, so Sam knows that he’s clear to call Dean a “jerk” because it’s playful again, and Dean immediately responds with the iconic “bitch” because brotherly banter. It’s got a lot going on there but none of it is asking Sam to deeply pierce why Dean would want to blow off the conversation and Sam has a fair amount of motive himself not to dig in deep and start up the fight or get into why he might have been wrong because Dean is still hurt and just blowing it off because it’s easier to forgive and forget than genuinely examine… blah blah this is later in the episode and I really hope I quit this habit of adding gifsets and meta every 3 minutes.

Anyway, the season 11 comparison side by side makes it clear they’re running through the exact same behaviour, but Dean uses the surface layer performing Dean bullshit to blow off Sam crying and make light of it. And with the more “serious” conversation next to it, you can see what Sam is really saying and the depth to which he’s going under Dean’s shell.

I think also there’s something interesting that of course we said it was Dean having his performing layer called out, and he was considerably more comfortable in season 12, though parts of it remained… I think it’s interesting that Sam has ALWAYS been able to sense Dean’s BS on the emotional level, and this is paralleling something right back to the start to suggest Sam is aware of the performing layer. Which, considering I spend a whole lot of time arguing Sam isn’t totally aware of it or whatever, is making me feel like Sam has a very conflicting interpretation towards Dean, and I would think often depending on the situation and how he is dealing as well. In season 4 for example he sees right through Dean’s attempt to bluff that he’s fine, but he draws all the wrong conclusions, leading him to feel he’s stronger and Dean lost his edge… A mistake partially made under the influence of demon blood, but it was a season long theme of Sam misreading Dean with very direct results so I kind of like it as an example.

Also interesting is Dean’s situational giving in and being honest in moments of high emotional drama but descending deep into his personalities especially in MotW where the plot/emotional pressure is light and he gets a chance to pretend to be just Dean the manly hunter, and spouts a lot of his nonsense in these sort of situations, especially when he’s already pretending for the job, and the writing is leaning towards a lighter, more fun version of Dean. (That is… surface level fun.) I suppose Sam chooses when to actually call Dean out, and also he does have an impression of Dean with some of the worst stuff Dean’s repressed genuinuely not factoring into it (for example, all the sanitised for Sammy growing up with John stuff that Dean’s kept a cap on, or his bisexuality, interest in non-manly things, etc etc).

Anyway, just sliding this onto the table for the performing!Dean discussion because I find it interesting, and there’s a ton more to think about here but I’m literally 10 minutes into 1x01 and hiatus is ticking away. :D


	16. Amara at the end of season 11 and how it goes into season 12

All the discussion of the end of season 11 and its reach into 12 recently has made me sort of mentally go back and think about some of those season 11 things again. Especially as I rewatched up to 12x06 yesterday with a friend, I ended up thinking a lot about Mary’s return and how it happened in season 11 

I was thinking about Amara’s brief visit to the Bunker and how it was pretty pointless, story-wise, since she never encountered anyone there and immediately got called to the place she was actually needed, except for ticking a lot of symbolism boxes, and of course giving us the moment where she wanders into Dean’s room and finds his picture of him and Mary together. Obviously that informed why she chose to bring her back, but I think perhaps that it was the WHOLE reason she decided to bring Mary back, in a “why her” or “why do something like this at all?” way. It just sort of all clicked right now how this ties into a lot of little things about the end of the season. 

I think it’s clear from her investigative techniques, questions and statements about Dean, that she was not as closely linked to him as being literally inside his head, despite how desperately Amara wanted to be bonded to him. She read his thoughts maybe a couple of times, directly, when they were in the room together, and we only know for sure she did it when she was touching him, specifically asking “Where are your thoughts?” and finding out about the Cas rescue he was hiding from her. There was a whole subplot about how she was misreading her intentions to him, projecting her own desires onto him, and reading them back again and subsequently misreading him as a result - it’s likely in the first half-to-two thirds of the season she literally thought Dean had the same feeling back to her she did to him. 

In short, Amara finding out about Mary through the picture is the only way she’d really find out about her in any solid way, and her understanding that it was what Dean needed most was her trying to read him again, by understanding that like her, he had a hole in him left by family, this was his missing family, and again projecting her understanding onto him through what had just happened with her (reconciliation with Chuck, that is). So it’s very likely Amara projects one last time onto Dean with her own feeling. I don’t think she ever quite understood him as his own person except perhaps the times she was diagnosing his emptiness and understanding what her call meant to him in terms of wanting oblivion. The whole rest of the season doesn’t give me much reason to think Amara was any good at understanding relationship dynamics or people’s emotional landscape without literally eating their soul to get at it, since it ends with her admitting to the misunderstanding about her feelings for Dean.

There were some complaints that came out of this that I remember seeing around fandom at the end of season 11 in various ways - in some ways, that in-character, was Dean REALLY missing Mary openly all season so much that this was the obvious choice, after all that drama with Cas and the pining comments and so on. And also, sort of more about how it all looked, that what had been a romantically coded arc jerked around into family stuff for Amara’s interaction with Dean, AND that meant in a way what had all been romantic subtext - the pining comment especially, which like Amara’s words about what Dean needed most turning out to be a person, suggested that if this was an arc that had been in the whole season, that was what Mildred had been talking about… It seemed to balance out when you added up the season with an unfortunate implication of it all seeming to have been about Mary when you took it into consideration (which was still a bummer for enjoying the Destiel subtext even if you assumed if it had meant that, then like with Amara’s abrupt switch to platonic family love, so had been what Dean was missing that season). Stuff like the sun imagery seemed to transfer to her from Cas, for example, so it was more than just Mary showing up, but she did seem to fit if you looked at it this way.

I’m obviously not the first person to say Amara realised Dean needed Mary back by looking at the picture he kept of her, because that was really obvious. Or the first person to say that Amara was misunderstanding Dean on many levels. And I’m definitely not arguing with the wider narrative, or saying that Mary coming back isn’t a great thing, both for the characters, the whole meta brilliance of un-fridging the first fridged woman of the show, and so on, because I love that and I’m enjoying Mary’s story so much this year. 

Going back to how I remember feeling at the end of season 11, where I think the potential of this arc sort of overwhelmed this reaction, I do wonder if there is room to argue that Amara once again fundamentally misunderstood Dean, at least not that he wouldn’t WANT Mary, but that she was the “thing he needed most” OR that Dean “needed” someone “the most” at all and that that emptiness could be filled with a person - Mary back might be a great way to deal with Dean’s issues from a very unexpected angle, but I’m not sure they were specifically about the lack of her at that point… I’m not even sure “give you the thing you needed the most” is a meaningful statement, like, that there is/should be a list for it or that we should assume anyone was competing for a space on it…

I don’t really feel like the Destiel arc stuff gets derailed by Dean suddenly being given a new top priority in the sense that it kind of does in-character (i.e. all the meta I’ve been writing about season 12 lately about Dean’s emotional arc being taken up with Mary so less focus on the Destiel one), but for the actual narrative of what happened in season 11, the ending doesn’t change what happened in the season or make it about her retroactively. Most of this just comes down to trusting Mildred’s analysis of Dean far more than Amara’s - she’s not saying that Dean was pining for Mary the whole time before that, just like in the beginning of season 11 when we were worried about this, a reassuring thought was that his confession in 10x16 can’t refer to Amara as his potential love interest*, because she didn’t exist yet as a being Dean was actually aware of, so also the “pining for someone else” thing doesn’t apply to Mary because she wasn’t in Dean’s emotional landscape because he didn’t have any reasonable expectation she’d be returned to him at that point, and there was no reason he’d be driven to distraction by not having Mary around while going about his day-to-day business. 

(*not because we hate Dean having love interests, but because Amara was mind-controlling him and removing his ability to consent to this relationship had it become one)

With Amara mis-reading and projecting onto Dean, and her emotional arc abruptly changing from her romantically coded fascination with him to an explanation that she was just missing her brother doesn’t shift the romantic subtext around Dean and pile it onto it having “just” been family coded the entire time earlier in the season (Mildred’s words were expressly about romantic relationships), and about Mary’s return. 

I think when it comes to Amara having her realisation, she’s much more mercurial, while all through the season Dean’s heart is much more thoroughly explored and established, and can’t be redirected by a few statements (and several instances were connected to romance making an arc all through the season for him on this side of things, which  when it came to random asides and comments, probably ended with “what’s it like settling down with a hunter”) 

She understands that Dean and Cas are close (Dean calling for Cas in 11x18 in front of her), and later using Cas to talk to Dean, and pulling Lucifer out of Cas but leaving him unharmed as she knows Dean is concerned about Cas as Lucifer’s vessel show she uses this… I almost wonder if her experience of relationships is so used to being “bonded” with everything she wants to be close with, she doesn’t realise that Dean and Cas paralleling her desire for a bond with Dean is so extraordinary.

In 11x21 when Amara asks where his thoughts are, she even misses that it’s ABOUT Cas (that is, it was about Lucifer, but by Lucifer we mean Cas so that redirect was textually established by Dean himself) and she learns from Dean the plot-related stuff there, while missing entirely that she was coming up against the other side of the love triangle and Dean was so concerned because it was about Cas. 

And at the end she learns Dean is missing his mother, and then learns the importance of familial relationships as a sort of ultimate form of love - the kind that can save the universe - and so she takes what she knows about Dean, and uses it to restore Mary to him, while all the subtextual closeness between Dean and Cas is ignored by her and the narrative if you’re looking for THAT to be the “thing that he needs the most”

I think in a way she’s never allowed “in” enough to see the full picture there, and so coupled with that and her deductions she makes about what Dean is missing, and even how he is feeling through a faulty link we know seemed to be giving her feedback from  her OWN feelings about everything… I guess basically there’s almost no correlation between these incidents?

It’s a small bit of disappointment I saw expressed about this and I don’t even know how far this particular bit of negativity was shared in the fandom, but I think I just found a (apologies, very convoluted) way to talk around it to make it feel a bit better. For me if no one else :P 


	17. Amara and Dean, The Beer Run, and the Siren Episode, and how it all connects

I’ve been seeing arguing about the Siren episode going around on my dash again (it must be hiatus :P) and it’s got me thinking.

Last year on my re-watch I hauled out everything I could think of for that episode so I wouldn’t have to go back there any time soon:

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/125513601548/spn-hellatus-rewatch-4x14-or-honestly-this>

just as some light background reading on my stand on this episode, though. :P After all the logic puzzles I use to justify it the tl;dr is the same conclusion as anyone making the bi!Dean reading off of it: the siren unequivocally proves, I think even before it MET Dean in person, that it can and will take the form of a potential lover to usurp a family relationship equally to a romantic relationship, and whatever it says, the earlier example and dynamic between it and Dean work much better to read it as a straight up (heh) seduction, more than anything else.

And obviously, (and bear this in mind as I eventually get to the real point of this post) this is a bad thing and I think probably very harmful to Dean’s self-expression because the siren takes advantage of his bisexuality to get at him - he’s on guard for any women coming at them (e.g. his suspicion of Dr Roberts) but the siren has equal opportunity to affect Dean as another gender, and he’s NOT on the guard for that so it essentially turns that into a weakness against him and by the end of the episode he looks absolutely fucked up about it. 

There’s another post I made earlier in the rewatch, comparing and contrasting this episode to 2x03 and Dean being (accidentally?) seduced by Gordon in the exact same pattern, and then in season 9 and 10 once again the same pattern, with Crowley finally succeeding:

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/121793969228/after-rewatching-2x03-i-made-a-throw-away-comment>

In each of these cases the “seduction” gets hidden behind a family reasoning, which all have valid psychological reasoning for Dean’s state of mind based on other shit that’s happening, but that detail allows them to “miss” the important subtext discussion about his bisexuality coming to the foreground. Just that the siren episode explicitly makes it about sexual attraction and so is the keycode to these episodes by how close to the surface it all comes.

in 2x03:

> SAM  
> Right, ‘cause Gordon’s such an old friend. You don’t think I can see what this is?
> 
> DEAN  
> What are you talking about?
> 
> SAM  
> He’s a substitute for Dad, isn’t he? A poor one.

in 4x14:

> NICK  
> Or it could be her saliva…You really should have wiped the lip of that thing before you drank from it, Dean. I should be your little brother. Sam. You can’t trust him. Not like you can trust me. In fact, I really feel like you should get him outtta the way, so we can be brothers. Forever. 

With Drowley, in 9x11:

> CROWLEY  
> Is all this really necessary? I mean, I’ve been inside your brother. We’re practically family.

& 10x01:

> CROWLEY  
> You know what tickles me about all this? It’s what’s really eating you up. You don’t care that he’s a demon. Heck, you’ve been a demon. We’ve all been demons. No, it’s that he’s with me and he’s having the time of his life. You can’t stand the fact that he’s mine.
> 
> SAM  
> He’s not your pet.
> 
> CROWLEY  
> My pet? He’s my best friend, my partner in crime. They’ll write songs about us, graphic novels. “The Misadventures of Growley and Squirrel.“ Dean Winchester completes me, and that’s what makes you lose your chickens.

(Tbh Crowley uses way too much sexual and romantic language for it to be clear cut as he’s the one character allowed to be upfront about hitting on Dean or, later, acknowledging him as a love interest since he actually does manage to seduce Dean, but he has a general vibe of him supplanting John or Sam… Among the many links within links in the things I’m referencing there’s a meta from someone else about Crowley specifically and this dynamic if I remember correctly >.>)

Anyway one of the other things informing this post (yes this is still the preamble) is how I was just recently thinking about Dean in season 2 and tracing a narrative about the season as a sort of gay panic for him:

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/146708762873/elizabethrobertajones-im-really-quite-fond-of>

and I think there are consistent threads where Dean scuttles back into the closet after early hopeful signs he may embrace his identity, either reacting to general pressure or occasionally specific incidents like the Siren episode or whatever. 

I replied to THIS post by @impostoradult after the 10x23 deleted scenes scripts were (leaked? shared? somehow made available?) talking about season 10 as Dean’s latest round of gay panic thanks to Crowley and our fears about it shifting Dean’s bisexuality into villainous queerness territory:

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/128805221373/elizabethrobertajones-impostoradult-well>

and tbh the start of season 11 re: the Drowley arc had the very mixed signals of 11x02 and especially with the suggestive comments Crowley made about Dean, seemed to be settling in on that interpretation being the suggested reading, although later episodes continues to treat them more as just bitter ex-lovers with Dean on a more equal footing, as he had been post-break-up in season 10.

but now, to finally get to 11x23, [@mittensmorgul](https://tmblr.co/mH08bFF21ewTCayiwIXZEOg) wrote this post which is extremely much more hopeful about a resolution of sorts to the issue of Dean’s Drowley-influenced latest quiet gay panic:

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/145124062883/how-canon-do-you-consider-drowley-and-do-you>

11x23 was very interesting for Drowley as it showed a mutual respect (the scotch Dean stocks in the Bunker, among other things) but also we had “that ship has sailed” the episode before, and then the moment of lingering looks between Crowley and Billie showing genuine change in the dynamic. Mittens talks about how Dean has moved on and is more comfortable with this being in his history, while Crowley is shown having moved on for himself, and being no longer on Dean’s hook (and he was stringing Crowley along in season 10 as much as Crowley was pining after him), he doesn’t represent any threat going forwards. Which suggests the beginnings of recovery for Dean, but of course coming only at the very, very end of the season.

For Dean season 11 was structured around basically another gay panic season, probably the most narratively obvious one since season 2 to me, as people were positing Amara as a spectre of heteronormativity coming for him (uh, intentionally in the writing, although it makes you wonder at least for the first half of the season when the fandom was in headless chicken mode about her, the tropes being played straight until they weren’t, and we’ll never know, especially with a change at the top of the ladder halfway through the season :P)

Thanks again to [@mittensmorgul](https://tmblr.co/mH08bFF21ewTCayiwIXZEOg) to help me curate a quick list of the Dean/Amara meta that’s been shaping the way I view it:

<http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/138388909445/dean-amara-free-will-gods-return>   
<http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/138288164775/texasbowlegs-okay-but-where-are-all-the-awesome>   
<http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/139435016490/magic-std-the-siren-and-the-qareen>   
<http://postmodernmulticoloredcloak.tumblr.com/post/144247118742/green-circles-1121-all-in-the-family-oh-i-am>

(all these links are essentially just so no one can say I’m talking out of my butt about any of this stuff but they’re also really interesting posts :P)

In any case, season 11 presents a narrative that shapes up to include a theme both of gay panic and pervasive, frightening heteronormativity. It’s implied Dean is beginning to come to terms with both, and that their darkest forms have been conquered and rejected etc.

And so to FINALLY get to the point which drove me to make this post. While reflecting on the eternal Siren Episode argument, my brain drifted to a parallel that kind of startled me on first thought:

> NICK  
> Or it could be her saliva…You really should have wiped the lip of that thing before you drank from it, Dean. I should be your little brother. Sam. You can’t trust him. Not like you can trust me. In fact, I really feel like you should get him outtta the way, so we can be brothers. Forever. 

& in 11x23, in the car ride:

> DEAN:  
> Yeah, that’s one word for it. But you’re always there, you know? You’re the best friend we’ve ever had. You’re our brother, Cas. I want you to know that.
> 
> CAS:  
> Thank you.

Obviously even superficially there’s a WORLD of difference. Dean isn’t coercing Cas to be family (and although it’s never been quite so bad as the siren thing, previous times Dean told Cas he was family, in 6x20/22 and 8x17, it was at least a sort of only-say-it-at-dire-moments use of family status as leverage vs 11x23 where Dean wanted nothing else from him than for Cas to KNOW he was family) and it’s honestly gifting brotherhood TO Cas, but at the very least there’s fandom arguments about both in how “brotherly” they really are, with Dean’s motivations in 11x23 similarly to Nick’s, using “brother” as a safe cover for the real feelings at work, or  suggestions that he’s either playing it safe or is too repressed to put a name to any feelings for Cas outside of the safe space of calling him brother.

I guess I’m suggesting that there’s an extremely substantial background (see above, all that rambling and linking) to argue that point, just for the sake of “because Destiel” and “obviously he has more feelings for Cas than that” being the best reasoning to explain the deeper meaning - obviously based off of years of other Destiel meta to justify Dean’s feelings which we can take for granted within the Destiel community by the time we get to this scene. But still. :P I don’t think I’ve seen anyone find a direct link to this dialogue specifically to try and pry it open with tools from earlier in canon? Getting to why Dean specifically falls behind “brother” deserves some exploration of its use as a kind of safety catch on the bi!Dean trigger for the length of the show (I haven’t even  _mentioned_  Benny, for example, who was pretty much equally presented as a brother or a lover or both depending on the angle of the episode or writer.)

Pretty much as soon as the episode aired people were casting doubt on Dean’s motivations in the “beer run” based on the heavy staging of the scene to underscore that Dean was being somewhat disingenuous about his reasons for going, and that he was buying alone time with Cas:

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/145012478315/so-the-scene-where-dean-decides-to-go-for-a-liquor>   
<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/145010248018/dean-winchester-and-the-confession-at-the-end-of>

([i have a whole tag for this moment if you really care](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/tagged/the-beer-run/chrono))

… basically alcohol-based deception to achieve his end. Yeah, I’m really committed to Dean as a good parallel to Nick, putting the moves on Cas because he just wants to fall in love. Only… not in a creepy way. :P

There’s also this post (which you would not BELIEVE how long I spent looking for on the assumption I’d reblogged it once)

<http://tatltaelfairies.tumblr.com/post/145137416430/angelicbadass-okay-still-digesting-the-finale>

which makes a point arguing in part from a similar place of the explanation for Hannah’s feelings for Cas, re: Amara’s interest in Dean (with of course the bonus that her thrall on him is a coercive love just like the Siren wanting to be loved and forcing its “spell” (aka poison) on people), but also brings up the point well about a way to read the explanation that shifts away Amara’s interest in Dean in 11x23:

> DEAN:  
> You don’t want to be alone. Not really.
> 
> I mean, hell. Maybe that’s why you wanted me.
> 
> But deep down, you didn’t really want me… 'cause I’m not him.

This is again a similar scenario to the Siren episode, but again played very differently. Dean as a third party (to Chuck and Amara) is given romantic attention by Amara, again, to pull on that heteronormativity meta, because it’s ~the way this stuff happens~ - the joke is that we worry she will be romantically interested in him, but it turns out to be a false lead playing on heteronormative expectations for the lady in the boob-revealing dress interacting with a male lead. But at the last minute the romantic is feeling is explained away as misplaced yearning to talk to her brother, and Dean, as always, is filling a sort of proxy role for the divine:

(not going to get over that moment’s endless relevance :P)

Anyway the point is, it’s part of the ongoing theme of the label being wrong - back in the siren episode, the label of brother is slapped on what is clearly romantic interest from the siren, manipulating sexual interest from Dean until he’s able to infect him with romance-chemical venom. Amara fixates on Dean and I think it is genuine interest and fascination, but with obviously the very wrong approach, poorly expressed, and in the early parts of the season, mistaking her thrall on him for his own bond with her. She misinterprets them as romantic love, and on that branch of the story we have the meta about what else she symbolically represents, but in the end what we’ve grumbled about all along from since she first started freaking Dean out like that, is that her affection is misplaced, and she should have had bigger fish to fry (honestly I still squint at that line months after 11x23 aired wondering if it’s not a heavy-handed “why did we need a romance subplot at all” criticism sneaked in from the guy who had to wrap up this arc and chose to be like “nah” and pull up out of the nosedive, so it sort of works on a very meta level to me :P) and so her attention is forced back to Chuck and what was labelled a romance (and least with tropes early on) is like “nah it’s a sibling thing”

And then as that post points out, with Cas Dean tries labelling their relationship and once again tries to cover over the complicated feelings with an incorrect label, that gets maybe the AMOUNT of love right, e.g. Cas is equally important to him as Sam is, but the actual TYPE of love is mis-labelled. 

(You could probably try to argue that the Amara/Dean parallel is meant to be directly applied to Destiel, but at no point was Destiel labelled openly and therefore “mistakenly” as romance between Cas and Dean - they’ve been calling each other “friend” or mentioning non-specific all-inclusive “love” with Sam in the same bracket e.g. 10x07, 10x22 - and 11x23 if anything follows/completes a pattern of mis-labelling Cas a brother. And we have written plenty about the way Cas looks and responds through that scene - for example this is the most recent time it’s come up on my blog:

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/146845112453/just-seen-9x06-properly-for-the-first-time-was>

and furthermore, Dean/Amara and Dean/Cas were played as foils and Dean/Amara as the romantic false lead for a good chunk of the season, through the [handprint imagery](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/tagged/Dean%27s-elbow-fetish-for-ts) and [rival bonds](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/tagged/pining-not-praying).)

I suppose in conclusion this was really just an attempt to pile up all the meta and several threads that have been following Dean for a LONG time or just within season 11 and explaining them all together to try and put more of a structure underneath all the stuff we’ve been saying about these scenes - I guess with a lot of this implicitly understood as long as you read all the meta over the season, and this is just a masterpost linking it all together as best as I can? I think episodes like the Siren episode can give us some really blatant examples if we listen to their message, and I see its language all over 11x23 even if it’s at the end of the day very different scenarios each time - with Amara the Mark may have forced Dean into a similar mindset to attack Sam as the Siren made him do once, but when he confronted her at the end he instead got her to reunite with  _her_  brother, calling on the power of real, non-coerced love. And with Cas, he tells him he’s a brother, but while it’s not forced on Cas, and you could say is hard-earned between them, and seems to be a positive development, lurking beneath the dubiously applied label of “brother” is an endlessly more complicated subject that has a lot to do with sexuality and romantic love until last-minute panic labelling. 


	18. The Beer Run

> **[sayurishiro](http://sayurishiro.tumblr.com/)**  asked:
> 
> I was a bit 'meh' about Dean calling Cas a brother until I realised that he was talking about how important Cas was to him AND Sam, so thanks for pointing that out as well =)

* * *

Yeah, it seemed really weasely - for Dean not from the writers - to give Cas the big apology, even when they were alone, as “we” and “our” and so on. I guess Jensen hyped it up as Dean giving personal reasons for why he liked Cas more which is where I can see the disappointment after what was said at JIB, but I think it goes unsaid that across the season Dean’s concern for Cas was shown in a very different way from Sam’s (and made an emotional focus while Sam was written differently), and when we’re given a season of compare and contrast, but then Dean gives Cas the heartfelt talk from a place of “we” instead of “I” he’s not talking through everything, and deliberately keeping it very much on a “safe” emotional level where he can hide behind “we” to disguise that “Sam” and “I” were two very different people about Casifer (and some people are [pointing out how disappointed Cas looked at this](http://thedoctorsjawn.tumblr.com/post/144948489802/i-want-you-to-look-at-the-last-three-gifs-misha)). 

But I think it was a huge step just to bring Cas into the fold and include him properly and have this all said in a level-headed conversation… (which is still disturbingly groundbreaking when he’s, what, going to be moving to his ninth year on the show? :P) To me, especially with how Sam’s season ended, it was  _really_  important to include Cas so much in TFW (as TFW and not just his connection to it through Dean) and go back to the support and stability third wheel thing Dabb kicked off in 8x08 (sorry, re-explaining my notes outside of the read more at this point >.>). Even from that conversation in the car, with Sam absent, that was building up to what happens to him? Just with the focus on TFW as a real, functioning group, trying to fix its old fractures of leaving Cas out in the cold and explaining the ideal where the 3 of them are meant to be there for each other, as best friends, brothers, whatever… As the first step to explaining the rest of the dynamics this episode.

Dean seemed to have absolute faith in Cas for being able to be there for Sam when he was gone (the graveyard scene request being the next step of this), and then Sam and Cas are split apart at the end even while Cas was doing his best to honour Dean’s request and check on how Sam was doing (Dean seems to think Cas will be fine losing him so I think there’s maybe an element he also doesn’t realise HOW gone on him Cas is - which stretches back to him missing Cas’s arc in season 10 almost entirely), and the resulting scene for Sam when he confronts Toni is  _sorely_  lacking the stability and support that Dean basically gave Cas the job to do for Sam? Sam was definitely going full out nothing to lose and no concern left for his own life in those final moments, as the sensible thing to do would NOT be to agitate the woman waving a gun at you, and challenging her that she wouldn’t shoot him. It’s like the end of 9x23 for Sam all over again in terms of where he was.

(this was definitely Dean’s growth season and we’ve been saying Sam is further behind - I’ve seen a lot of people comment this - but I guess this was squarely putting the narrative of the need for growth on Sam now especially when Dean seems to have unlocked the ultimate reward for character growth on his side of the story :P

Also not to say Cas is now “about” Sam especially as I’ve answered like 95% of this ask about Destiel stuff with waffling about Sam stuff, but that I think TFW is supposed to now be a functioning unit, for season 12, or working towards that, and so showing an immediate consequence of them being apart and the 2 branches of it that have less screen time and bonding - Sam and Cas - are still apparently deemed to be close enough that it’s necessary to SHOW separating Cas from Sam to have Sam do something reckless… I really liked that imagery and what it said about Cas in TFW. So Dean explaining how TFW should be functioning as an ideal in that scene is very much about Sam as much as the personal moment between Dean and Cas)

Anyway yeah basically I felt like that conversation skimmed over the top of the vast oceans of Destiel subtext to be a team building exercise for the sake of Sam and Cas in the final scene? Like, in a way, it was saying  _nothing_ about Destiel but not in a “it’s not there” way but in a “we’re talking about something else” way. 

(And then we have Dean’s concern about Cas that continued right up to at least the resolution of the Casifer arc from Dean’s eyes when he poked Cas awake, and Cas’s maudlin looks about Dean and unsaid words while Dean was doing all his goodbye stuff. So the subtext - the entire Casifer arc’s Destiel nonsense just as an example - and acting is still keeping them in love and star-crossed in the bigger picture.)

(If season 12 is more focussed on Sam emotionally, and I actually do hope it is just because he’s really due the character development, we might get more of this where stuff actually tracks back to Sam’s problems, in the way we could basically track everything to Dean’s problems instead over the last few years…)


End file.
